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All right, everybody, it's Friday. Molly and I are ready to get this party started. Cheers, Molly. | Cheers. Clink. Clink. Yeah. We're having a little happy hour taping. |
Yeah, we know who you mean. This is Castellana Villa. It's an Italian Vincenzo, which is essentially like a dessert wine, fortified dessert wines, ports and those kind of things. I am a big fan of these. And he put me on to this one. And then you know, like, like my friends are out to do he sent me like a case of them. Very nice of him. It's not absurdly expensive. And, you know, in terms of the Chamathla seller, but you know, very nice to get a case of those. And um, I like to sip it it takes me a little while to get through a bottle But since it's fortified it lasts a little while like a poor bottle of less Are you drinking something special or just like a five dollar like you know what? | Come on, it's like fourteen dollars I love no judgment. I love a 13 to 20 like in if you buy a california wine between 13 and 20 It's gonna be good. Yeah Yeah, it's just it's a red blend. I love a red blend nice. I'm not gonna buy a case of it, but it's just |
Working great. Now I see you're not at home in the in the normal studio. Where are you? | It's true. I'm in an MBA. I'm having a digital nomad adventure. I am just a little bit east of San Diego. I'm in Southern California. I can see the Salton Sea from here. Oh, wow. What's weird about that is that it's a super, like, mountain cabin. We're in the mountains, like, up a little bit high. It's like a girl's trip. I came here because I had read that it has amazing fall foliage. Nice. Which I'm sure that it does a month from now. They got you. They got you. So, I'm looking out at a beautiful green valley. |
well, I'm glad you know, it's nice to have this nomadic lifestyle. And yeah, nice. Get a little weekend for yourself and your girlfriends. I love it. We just taped the we just taped the 100th episode of the all in podcast. Quite nice. I think it's gonna be a big hit. It was good. We were like in a very loving, you know, it's kind of like an anniversary, you're kind of thinking about all the good times. And one of my co hosts there, David Sachs, if you've heard of him, Kraft Ventures. He's very passionate about Russia's invasion of the of Ukraine. God keeps saying the we were raised on it. | It's hard to shake. |
It's hard to shake. Yeah, thing. I am aware of it. And I'm working on it. | So I correct myself every time, like I'm sure a million other people do every day. |
But it was an interesting moment, because I asked him three times 3123. Do you support the United States forcing Zelensky and Ukraine to the table in order to get a negotiated settlement for this becomes to World War Three. And you haven't heard it yet. It's being edited as we tape this. And it was a you can handle the truth moment where sacks says, we're the daddy, we're America. These are our weapons we have. And it was like a real profile and courage of him saying, like, you know, put aside how we all think about this. It's very hard to understand what's going on over there. There's a lot of history. It's a very complicated issue. Obviously, I'm no expert on this stuff. You know, and, you know, he's added some expertise, but a very interesting moment in time, where he just went down and said, That's it, you know, like, I think we have to force a settlement here and say, Listen, by this date, you can do what you want as Ukraine. But you know, we need you to settle this, you know, and we're not going to endlessly fund this war through weapons. | I think it's going to be a pretty interesting moment. |
certain collection of guys and their, and their sudden expertise, let's just say, well, you know, it's one of the things I encourage people is, you know, to start their own podcasts, if they have strong feelings, I think podcast a great medium. And I also encourage people when we're talking about capital allocation on that podcast, markets, finance, macroeconomics, even startup, certainly, poker on the margins, to delight and absorb take notes even on our expertise. And then for other topics, you are welcome to join the discussion as civilians and participate as you see fit. | I'm on the internet. Looking forward to hearing it. It will be many interesting moments on the internet. I'm sure. I'm sure. A lot of a lot of chit chat on the internet about |
Get a like, this is not geopolitical advice, except that it totally which, you know, as a former market commentator, as co host of marketplace, feels like the market is bouncing along the bottom, huh? Big inflation print today. | Yeah. Maybe you could get like a little sting. You know how sometimes we say this is not investment advice. |
No chance. That's off the table. It's 75. If not a full point. I say here, it's a one in five chance of that. Oh, my Lord, I do think this is like bouncing on the bottom. | It is. Yeah, big. I know. That was disappointing. I think it probably puts the lie sounds harsh. I think it will probably prove any wrong. He said in our crypto roundtable, he thought that the the fundraise would be 50 bits instead of 75. No, no chance. |
advertising first to go, and then slow to bounce back. And then if you there seems to be a series of, you know, capitulation in the markets, you know, and some things are a little bit sticky, like housing, we talked about here many times, people can live in houses. So unlike their holdings in crypto, or in a growth stock and Peloton, you know, they can get out of their Peloton stock, they can sell their Bitcoin, know, your house takes a big considered sale, you got to find a buyer, all that stuff. So those things tend to take a little while. The thing that's very interesting to me is we had 1,000,002 jobs, I think burn off in August, we'll see what happened in September shortly. Those numbers are trailing. But that was a big amount of burn off there. And I think the Fed really wants to see jobs, correct. And in order for jobs to correct, you know, where would you look for a bellwether for that? I think you look to Microsoft, Google, and Apple and other companies that have so much money, they don't need to do a riff. And we've talked about the gentleman's rift here on this pod many times. But you are hearing the saber rattling, right? You hear Sundar saying, like, hey, we got to be more efficient. You got Apple saying you got to come back to work, you know, knowing that 5% of people will quit when you do that. So it does feel like we're in the endgame. | I think so too. I think we will have one to two years of negative impacts. My friend who I'm here with today is the big wig in the content and media space and has been saying, you know, you know, she's like, I expect our business to improve a roughly a year from now, spring of 2020 is when kind of, you know, like, I think you said advertising is like the first to go in the first to bounce back. Maybe it'll be first to go. |
And when low tide happens, you know, it's, we're not gonna be able to surf the big waves anymore, but it's at least not gonna, you know, it's, I think it's gonna be prolonged bottom. I agree with that, too. So I'm thinking about some j trades. I was watching Amazon seems to I don't know, sorry, Andy, Jesse, Jesse, some of his comments leaked, I guess, or some of his notes. He said, Listen, we're going to do more with less. And we're not going to have hiring freezes. And we're gonna get rid of people. And I encourage you to think like a startup and basically be more gritty. I think that's exactly what the market needs is for those companies to say we're going to try to give people growth and show people we can grow and have great earnings even in a down market. So the proof as I told one founder today, you are in the show me market. not the tell me market, you have to show good results or else you're not going to get funded. Because they were wondering, she was like, Hey, how come I'm not getting funded? I said, Well, do you have a 10 week chart that shows increases of 2345% week over week? Yes or no? No. Okay, stop everything you're doing. And just make that happen. If you want to get funding or find a path to break in profitability. Are you sick and tired of huge SaaS bills? I know I am. And switching between 10 different platforms every day, it's chaos. SaaS churn is real. And you need to check out Odoo to reduce SaaS burnout. Odoo is a suite of business apps. That's basically the only software you're ever going to need. And it's a great way to cut costs and be more productive. And listen, we all know it's a crazy market out there. You want to extend that runway because hey, listen, it's a down market right now and you're going to have to survive. That means you're going to have to make every dollar count. So you need to check out Odoo. All of your SaaS apps will run on one platform with Odoo. So you have one customer support rep, not 10, and they have 40 main apps and 16,000 apps from their open source community. You know, important stuff, sales, marketing automation, HR, website builders, and so, so much more. And Odoo will only charge you for the apps you use, so you get more done in less time, and you're going to save a ton of money. Here's the best part. Your first app is free forever. And Odoo is offering a $1,000 credit on your first implementation pack. That's odoo.com slash twist for $1,000 off odoo.com slash twist. In all of this mashugana that's going on. Yeah, well, in all this chaos, there's mashugana. I don't know if you saw the story. | I think so. It doesn't, I don't. I mean, we should be clear when we say we're bouncing along the bottom that that the bottom is in some ways the beginning of the pain. Right. It's the it's a depending on who you are. The Fed is inflicting this pain. Now, the indicators of the pain will be trailing, meaning that the pain will get more intense. Like the beatings are not going to stop immediately. Uh, 75 or God help us. One basis point raise would be, would cause a lot, will cause a lot more pain. both either of those will cause a lot more pain. So it's sort of like, we're at the bottom now, then there's going to be the plateau. I think that's where I was in the valley for a while, you know, it's a long, slow climb out, low tide will happen. |
I think it is. I think it is. Why don't you queue it up? And then I'll I'll drink my, uh, my little Vincenzo here. Explain this Michigan to me. | But I love it. I saw this story. And I was like, what? And then Matt Levine wrote about it. And I was like, wait, Is this real? |
Basically. Yeah, I mean, they always said Aaron from box had a writer or a team writing his tweets because he's so funny. It just turns out he's actually funny and witty. I don't think he has a Yeah, a writer. I think he might have somebody who edits with him like on his comms team or whatever. Aaron from box who by the way, just let's producers take it out. I saw her in the other week. When Molly and I did our chat, we should have him on the pod soon. We should It's not crazy to think that somebody would put a ghostwriter on retainer for blogging. That's a thing. And so why not for tweets? It makes total sense. 2025 vcs seems like a lot. The $100,000 for one thread, I don't buy that. I don't think that's a correct number. Maybe they maybe the journalist transcribed it incorrectly. But yeah, I I can see people paying 5000 a month for retainer, who cares if you're a VC, you probably have like 100 200 k budget to do content or, you know, to travel to events or whatever. | I mean, I will do my best. Okay. So an anonymous writer told business insider that they made $200,000 last year, ghost writing tweets for venture capitalists. This ghost writer claims that he can write a tweet that gets as many as 4 million impressions. Can't we all? His clients accounts range from 2000 to 200,000 followers. He says he's takes on about 20 to 25 clients at a time and spends five hours a week on it. Notes that the smaller clients end up paying more because they're the ones who need the distribution and prices have ranged from a hundred thousand dollar threads. To $100 single tweets, or this person claims some VCs just pay per month. That's like a retainer. They charge five to $10,000 a month to write 10 original tweets. the rates go up from there because every VC wants to be you and me. |
If you're a new VC, if you're a new VC, you need deal flow. Yeah. So how do you get deal flow is the question. People have watched me blog, they watch me do podcasting. They saw other people like Fred Wilson, Mark Schuster, and Brad fell were in that early VC investor podcast, blogging, and then podcasting. And so I think people have said, you know, it's kind of a prerequisite to have some social content marketing strategy. It's not I think, actually, I would think it's kind of the opposite right now. I think since it's so flooded, and I think actually just being old school, if I was going to do it, I would just do meetings with other investors constantly to try to make deal flow and then, you know, tweet like maybe not that often, but sure, I think there's one of the nice things about social media is there's a scorecard, likes retweets, follows. And so you do see, you know, folks, we had Mac, the VC on here, and he got he created a following and then raised a fund off of it. So it's definitely a strategy. I look at Twitter as like the new, you know, conference circuit. It's a new circuit, where you would meet people, build deal flow, meet LPs. And instead, you don't have to leave your house. And so people now perfected it. The thread is like, for me, I don't do threads anymore, because it's kind of like the threat of death, I find it like, Oh, God, when I see that thread logo, I'm just like, Oh, my Lord, who wrote this? And like, what startup advice is this that Yeah, it's commodified. I think there's a lot of commodified startup advice. And so when you're the bigger important thing, Molly, for me is how should founders take all this advice, and I think they should take it with a grain of salt. Write it in a book, maybe if it sounds notable, but you know, you need to get advice from people who've actually done the job, built a company or done the SEO or done the whatever it is the specific thing you're trying to do. | So I mean, it does. Let's assume it's true. Let's just like stipulate that we think this is true. Sure, it's true. What does it say to us about how important it is to have effectively a content marketing strategy, no matter what your product is, even if your product is you as an investor, you as a firm, like would this ever have happened? before. |
I mean, a thread, a blog post, medium LinkedIn come to mind, you can link to the fuller version. know, if you just take the headings of what would be your blog posts, if there were eight headings, you could just do the headings as you know, really concise TLDR too long didn't read. | It does make me wonder about the use of other platforms like this. I actually asked you the other day, I was like, Okay, I'm close to publish, you know, it's been almost 10 months, I'm getting I'm having some thoughts about thesis companies that are appropriate for me and us as a firm, like, I think I'm ready to write up this thesis in this one page. And I was like, where should I publish this? And there's a real strong argument that I want to publish it somewhere that I can link to so someone can find it again. But really, shouldn't it just be a thread? I think a thread that will be $100,000 thread people |
You can't do probably Yeah, it's been growing. My Twitter has been growing quite nicely. Yours has been growing quite nicely. It has Twitter still the water cooler for our end. I think certain industries are very sticky on Twitter. NBC happens to be one of them. | So yeah, but it has to be a Twitter thread. This is what I'm saying. Like, you got to have both. |
Yeah, those both have to do with networking in order to get deal flow or information. And they also are industries where you are self directed in terms of your time. Therefore, you can slide in Twitter and leave it up all day. and participate in it all day and justify it. Now, if you were a video editor, and you're freaking around, or you're a salesperson, you're screwing around on Twitter all days, your boss is going to come to me like, shouldn't you be editing videos? Shouldn't you be talking to customers? But when you're a VC, or you're a journalist, it's like, yeah, I'm talking to sources. No, I'm sourcing deals. And so really, on a sourcing networking basis, it's really good for people who have to source stuff. And then I don't know if you saw you on the other day, know, tweeted about his burnt hair perfume, he sold 10,000 in an hour. And now it's up to 20,000. So, you know, if you have a big fine, he obviously has the largest following, but people with very big followings can and that was a joke, you know, like, you can really move stuff. I'm doing this founder university starting November 14. I'm teaching it. I tweeted about it three times. And we're now at 400 people. And the record before was 200. And we're still weeks out. And I'm like, I got maybe we'll go for 600 or 800 people in the class. Yeah. University if you want to join the class 12 weeks, I'm teaching every Monday night at 6pm Pacific. | I think it has to also journalism, ironically, both. Those two probably more than any other, I would argue. |
precisely. So, it's awesome. Makes total sense. I don't know if it applies to every industry. I'm not sure it applies to every person but there you go. Right. You know, sure, maybe. Why not? I mean, if you're, I mean, some people are introverts. Some people are not good at writing. | Well, same with our same public race, right? Like, several VCs who raised their entire funds on Twitter, we're going to raise a not insignificant portion of our funds from these webinars that you tweeted about. |
Like, no, no, it has to be brand. Yeah. It has to be related to brand. And if you're a writer who understands capital allocation, you understand tech and you have just a little bit of wittiness or cleverness, for sure you could do this. What I want to know, is and if whoever this writer is, I'll give you 500 bucks to give me the proof of who you did this for. So I will send this whoever has this information. I want to know the list of customers. I want them to out for me who's not writing their own tweets. If somebody gives me that list, I will ship you $500 on Venmo, whatever you're using in private. I'll totally do it. Yeah, somebody leaked this information to me, I'll give you 500 bucks cash, no questions asked, just leave it to me. And just prove it somehow, like give me a screenshot of you DMing with the person or whatever. But yeah, give me the leak. I want to know who it is. I want to know who is or just mention who you think it is. If you're an accredited investor, you need to know about special purpose vehicles. What's an SPV? It's an investment vehicle that allows 250 accredited investors to invest up to $10 million via one entry on a startup's cap table. So if you're an angel investor, you've got a bunch of rich friends, maybe your poker buddies, you can start your own syndicate powered through SPVs, just like me. At TheSyndicate.com, we are powered by our friends over at Shure. My syndicate has over 10,000 members and almost 5,000 of them have already done a deal and I've done over 250 deals thanks to my friends at Shure. They do all this back end and fund administration for me. They're the leading provider of SPVs and fund administration in the world with over $2.5 billion in AUA, assets under administration. And they've completed wait for it over 5000 transactions. Nobody's done more. Nobody's done it better. They've developed their own innovative software called glassboard to automate the entire investment experience from entity formation all the way to IPO. And not only do investors love it, but founders love this process as well because it keeps their cap tables nice and clean. And so you can trust them. They're really hard working and they do a great job super responsive to get 20% off your first special purpose vehicle visit ashore.co slash twist a s s u r e.co slash twist that's ashore.co slash twist to get 20% off your first SPV in other VC news. I don't know if this story is actually super accurate. I saw this Wall Street Journal story. I think I send it to you as well. Mm hmm about VCs not being able to find investable late stage deals. So they're looking at public market deals and saying, better than some of the late stage private companies, I'll just put my money in a public company. | Now, Matt Levine did raise the point that like what if you, you gotta have your persona on Twitter even if it's ghostwritten cannot be that far from your real personality because if people then meet you or invite you to conferences and you are nowhere near that charming and funny, it's gonna be a problem. Yeah, you gotta like, you gotta modulate. You can't like, put, you know, I'm trying to think of someone hilarious. We can't put Wanda Sykes out there. And then be Bill Gates. |
Yeah, investing in a publicly traded company already that's undervalued, you have all the data. you know, a number of firms have are now registered as investment advisors, as opposed to under this venture capital exception in the venture capital exemption, you can only put like 10 or 20% of your funds, capital into non traditional public market equities, whatever, had to all be private companies under a certain age or something. It's kind of a wonky rule, but I know that Sequoia and Andreessen went through this specifically, Andreessen did it, I remember because they wanted to be involved in crypto, which didn't fall under this and the tokens and whatnot. So this is for me, I'm thinking about doing some J trading now I am I said when I started the J trading process is going to be like a bottoming out process. So I want to pick some names, maybe double down on some names. I think it's gonna be an interesting place maybe to look for ideas. So I would like to find out who Sequoia is investing in, I see that they purchased over 2.5 million shares in data analytics firm amplitude. And then they bought 574,000 new shares of DoorDash. And Sequoia was largest shareholder in both of those companies before they went public. So this is very interesting for me to watch happen. I think that this as a trend could be a super interesting way for public market investors. I don't know, just to know smart people are looking at that. | We've talked what I feel like is happening with this Wall Street Journal story is something that we've talked about now several times, which is that you have really big firms spinning out a public equity arm, you know, or allocating some of their capital toward buying public companies and and kind of scooping up like taking advantage of what is really like a big sale on the stock store. And maybe you missed out on a deal the first time around, but you have now this equity fund alongside your venture fund, which is a trend in BC that we've talked about before. So I wasn't, I couldn't totally tell what about this was exactly new. Although I do think it's an interesting part of the kind of like, how do you deploy capital? And if you're maybe thinking to yourselves, there aren't going to be that many private companies at the stage we're at when I got a shove a hundred million dollars into something. Yeah. going public seems like the right bolt. |
Well, I don't think they would use investor money to prop it up. No. Because these companies, you have to drill down how much cash they have. | So now if they bought amplitude, I'm looking up their stock here, amplitude stock, if they want one, what do we think about the fact that before they went public Sequoia was the largest shareholder in these companies, and then now they're buying a bunch of stock? Like, is that a prop up? |
They have historical information. They know the founders, they understand the business, because they've been in it for five or 10 years. | Yeah, right. My only other my other question to in addition to of course, they've drilled down on these companies, they probably have better, hopefully not better public information. The information part of this gets tricky. Because Sequoia, the firm, right? What kind of firewalls do they have? |
Well, they said they're going to do the Sequoia fund where if you're in the Sequoia fund, and let's say you had they invested in door dash, and then that one public, you could take your money in and out of the Sequoia fund every year or something. Yeah, redemption period. And so yes, they could be taking that investor money and just increasing their position in it. And if you look at this company that they mentioned, if I have the right one here, amplitude. amplitude was trading January 3 at $52 a share. | Totally. And so it probably is like a vote of confidence. But my other question is, is it the same LPs? could you? Can you do this with the same LP? It's like you have a public equity fund? |
And they had a 60% stock drop in February. And it's been bouncing along the bottom at $14 a share since then. So it looks like Yeah, yeah. | And then it came crashing down. |
And they might even be on the board of this company, you never know. | So they were like, we know these guys are really like, um, we have great historical information on them and so we're making a bet now that there's a discount. |
Well, I guess board members can increase their positions. There is a process for doing that, right? They have to file that they intend to do that. So if we look at the board of directors of amplitude, about us amplitude, let's take a look and see who's on the board. I'm going to guess. | So you know, this is the really interesting like it gets tricky, like if you're on the board, can you do that? |
There you go. Boom. So this makes sense to me, you know, and I like it. And this means to me that I am going to put a J trade and I think on amplitude. I think following into him. I mean, it just seems I'm going to do some research on it before I do, but I'll put it on the docket for Monday. So if we could rate producer Rachel, he put on the docket just to go over amplitude and do a deep dive on that. DoorDash. I know they're doing great. And I understand that. I wonder if Andreessen Horowitz made in the story. Did they talk about Andreessen Horowitz making any they did. They did. I mean, here's the thing, Molly. we know that the growth stage investments before IPO last time were in some cases, not great investments in the stocks went down from their last private company rounds, right? So before the IPO happened, and the and you could buy public shares, the private rounds were higher than where they're trading now. And so if you believed in it, then why wouldn't you believe in it now? And if you're looking for a place to put money, why not? As an example, all birds raised out a $1.7 billion private valuation in September of 2020. He's got a $4 billion market cap. Now it's worth 478 million. I don't know if I want to be in that. But it does show you that it's trading at one quarter. | Here we go. Board of Directors. Let's see. Anybody from Sequoia? Yep. Pat Grady from Sequoia is quoted in the article. |
Well, if you look at people have been talking about DoorDash and team, I'm team DoorDash. We people look at both Uber and DoorDash is undervalued, they've become kind of like they are the Google, Yahoo, whatever you whatever the word is here, you know, Google, Facebook would probably be the better analogy with, you know, Uber, obviously having two businesses and being much larger. But Facebook having like a really carved a niche for itself that became a duopoly and advertising. And this seems to be a delivery duopoly. | One third. This is interesting, too. It looks like Andreessen in the first quarter by million new shares a block out of its five billion dollar growth fund square previously square. And Mark Andreessen has once has apparently said in the past that failing to back square, which it was known as then as a private company was one of his regrets as an investor. And then Andreessen also purchased over 1.4 million shares of DoorDash out of the same time. So DoorDash seems to be the winner here. People are triangulating on DoorDash just |
But other people, we knew that and Uber almost bought DoorDash. I don't know how public those deliberations have been. But there was a there was a moment, interesting, where they could have got it done for about 10 billion. From what I understand. I don't don't don't re aggregate that. But that was my memory serves me correctly. There was a $10 billion number. probably would have been a good idea for both companies. But even still, both companies are making money now. And they both have significant user bases and people are addicted. The product market fits there. Now people are looking at the union economics saying check that works. And now we're out of the know, burn money free market environment. So there's no choice but to be profitable. You know, if you got to lose 10% of your top line or customers to be profitable, those businesses are going to do it. And they seem like their top line and bottom line is growing at the same time. So anyway, it seems like a really interesting way to go about it. It's interesting signal. I think it's also going to make them better private market investments. You think about you and I, as private market investors, we have to think about in every company we have, how is this going to fare as a public company eventually, and you know, in unit economics, and the quality of the revenue is super important in the private markets, you can kind of not worry, or you should worry, but you can kind of suspend disbelief, you're like, well, it's growing the top line. Eventually, there'll be a bottom line. with Uber, Bill Gurley, I and a couple of other people, Travis, we had looked at the numbers was like, yeah, if you add $1 to every ride, this thing prints money. If we lose $1 per ride now, that's a $2 swing. Is anybody going to not take an Uber or a Lyft or a door dash for $2? Yeah, 5% of the market is probably that price sensitive. The other 95% isn't if they become addicted to this. And sure enough, that's what's passed. prices went up, things became profitable. And, you know, the end of story. But, you know, in private markets, we see a lot of companies who only focused on top line super profitable. They are cash flow profitable. Now, you have to, you know, there's a thing with the stock compensation, and then special one time things either write downs of in write downs of holdings like Diddy, you know, a lot of those things cause chaos. And so did so there were write downs, write ups and write downs and cashing outs that were occurring. And then there's a stock based comp, but on a cash flow basis, I believe the cash position is growing. Don't quote me on this. But I think and I don't have inside information. But yes, both of these businesses are now in the profitable kind of phase. I would say awesome. Depends on if you believe this is another issue. If you believe stonk, stonk, stonk, compensation for employees should count. You know, stock compensation does impact the shareholders of the company, I kind of don't care. I kind of care about the actual revenue of the business or whatever. I don't care. You probably do at some point have to rein in crazy Silicon Valley sock compensation, which got out of control. And that's actually happening. I don't know about Uber, but other places are like, Yeah, you're lucky to have a job. We're gonna you're not getting your money, right? I mean, remember the days of like, you know, hey, I have an offer from Google. I have an offer from Facebook. I got an offer from Apple. Yeah. And I could have offers from Airbnb and Uber. But I have too many offers to even consider at this moment in time. Therefore, I'll work for your startup if you pay me like half of the money you just raised. And it's like, go work at Apple, please. We can't I beg you can observe you please to be having this. All right, listen, this brand has a special place in my heart. The founders, Brandon and Carmen are twist listeners. They've been for a long time. And they told me they started this company. I kid you not after listening to the pod and reading my book angel. Oh my god, that warms my heart. In fact, their first angel investment wound up being a big hit. What do they do with the money they made? They use the returns from that investment to start a macadamia nuts business. I am crazy. Happens to be my favorite nut. I love it with dark chocolate. And you can see this graphic on the screen. Not all nuts are created equal. This is why you need to get on a macadamia nuts compared to peanuts, almonds, cashews and walnuts. Macadamia nuts are higher in omega sevens. That's what's been linked to fat loss and natural collagen. And they have more healthy fats. They also have less carbs because, you know, listen, I'm trying to lose a little weight here. And the product is vegan keto and paleo. Take it from me. I eat these macadamias all the time. They're totally delicious. And I love the bars. They have spicy ones. They've got dark chocolate covered ones. Here's what I want you to do. Here's your call to action. Get in on macadamias. I'm all in on them. Houseofmacadamias.com says twist right now for 20% off just for being a listener. The nuts are delicious. The bars are amazing. And of course, the dark chocolate dip packs are my favorite house of macadamias.com slash twist Friday variety show goes on turning to the world of web three and the metaverse. | Yeah, that's forming. It's kind of interesting, like, historically, nobody would have looked back at that, I think, four years ago and thought Uber and DoorDash would be head to head competitors, maybe you and Travis did. |
There's a thing called DAP radar, this shows you like the sales and stuff like that. It's worth pulling up the chart here. And looking at it, if you put it at 30 days, and you look at the transactions, and historical activity, my lord, the volumes and transactions have just hit the floor on this thing. And, yeah, it's, it's just gonna be rough. on all of these things that don't actually provide value in the world. Now, if it was a startup, and the startup failed to get traction, you'd be like, okay, no problem. But if a startup has sold whatever amount, I don't know what the actual amount of real estate that they grifted on to consumers is, but people bought a lot of this stuff, you know, and just like people bought a lot of NFTs. And so that's really the challenge here is people bought so much into these systems, you know, millions, hundreds of millions, in some cases, you know, maybe a billion. | Yeah, just a quick little update on a drama throughout the last couple of days Decentraland, which is a blockchain. What is Decentraland? Oh, it's virtual land, a virtual land metaverse that I believe they spent like $2 billion on, disputed claims that it's billion dollar virtual land metaverse had only 38 active users in one day. They said, that's absolutely not true. For example, from October 6th through the 12th, the platform averaged 7,000 unique visitors per day and put a dashboard out. But I would say, even though there's a large Delta between 38 and 7,000, if you spend a billion dollars on a product, and that's where you landed, might be a slow grower. |
I mean, people are looking at we didn't really this week, get into the Facebook, Oculus, the new lens, we were going to have Alex on, we just couldn't make it work. We had such a busy week. But you know, I kind of feel like it's still do I, I feel like people don't want these headsets, I feel like there's no use case. I think across the board, they're increasing the fidelity, they're making it faster. But to what end, if there's nothing for people to do, and then there was some memo earlier in the week, where Facebook was like, Listen, you guys got to use this product, we're building it, you know, I need you to use it. And that's like when you know, Google was like, please use Android phones, people are showing up to work with iPhones, we need everybody here to use a Chromebook, we need you all to use Android phones. And I'd be at a party and I'd see, you know, Google executives and like, two out of three would have an Android and one out of three would be like, Yeah, I got an Android in my backpack, but I use my iPhone. when I'm at the office, like literally somebody told me when I'm at the office, I don't take out my iPhone. I take on my Android when I'm at an industry event, I take on my Android. | I think what it really comes down to, too, is like, if, if at this point, a founder came to us, let's say somebody, you know, we've asked people to come and founder university and like, bring an idea. If your idea is, I am going to build a virtual land company in the metaverse, or I'm going to build anything for the metaverse at this point. Yeah. we're gonna tell you, mom, you see how this thing shakes out, like, it's a little too early for you as a founder, probably, to get the kind of traction that you're going to want. |
The problem I have is the metaverse has been here for a long time. it's boring. And there's no use case and people don't get any value from it. I did watch boss, the CTO over Facebook tweeted a couple of the videos. And I watched one of the videos and it showed a woman at her desk with a keyboard and mouse wearing the headset. And just like we have these multi monitor setups that we love with rigs and floating monitors, she had the three floating monitors. And she was typing on a key a real keyboard, I think or could have been a virtual one. | Yeah, I'm using my iPhone when I'm not, you know, and now global market share of Android is much, much, much larger, right than iPhone like that. It's so it's not to say that the metaverse won't ever get there. But if I were going to start a company now, it would not be based on the metaverse. |
she did have like three screens up. And I was thinking, hey, you know, you're at your Airbnb here, what if you could bring your headset or you're on a flight and you had three giant screens, and you were, you know, a day trader, or you're got your slack, and you're Spotify, and you're just rocking out without having to have a setup, you know, that's kind of dope. You know, if you were on Google, if you're on the Google bus or an airplane, or I don't know, you're, you're sitting in like a park, and you know, you're on this, you're on the ski lift going up for 10 minutes, you're in a gondola, you put this thing on, and you can pop up your desktop. I mean, it's kind of trippy. I don't know if I want to that. I think I want to enjoy the view. | It was hard to tell. But |
It's how much of their how much of their lack of success is attributable to, or I don't want to say the people making fun of it, because that's obviously in large part due to Zuckerberg's personality. But somebody asked me this, do you think that they would be people be rooting for it a little more people would be more apt to try it if it wasn't Zuckerberg and his bad reputation? Do you think it has any impact on the adoption of the product itself? | But as much as people, you know, it's funny, because everybody dumps out like there was a big announcement with Microsoft, that like teams and all these in the Microsoft productivity suite is all gonna happen in the metaverse. And you know, it's like I'm all in on this. And it's funny because it's easy to dunk on it. But the best use case for VR right now is work. And that may be boring, but it turns out it's made Microsoft did turn a lot of money. And so I like fine, right? That's okay, if it's kind of boring, and it makes work way cooler. And you can actually collaborate on stuff. And you can do designs together in a space and like, there's some awesome work possibilities that can be done it's just that you know when you get up and you have like this big event and you show it off and you got mark doing his god king dance and whatever it's like just make it for work. Like you don't have to sex it up. |
mean, they just never that I don't think they understand the product market fit here. What they should be doing is they should have somebody who's like a real expert at productivity, you know, and workforce stuff, and then somebody who's a real expert at art, and then somebody who's a real expert is what I would do if I was Zack, I'd have somebody who's an artist and really good at art, somebody who's really good at education, somebody who's really good at work. And I'd say, Listen, I, you know, as a technologist, I'm obsessed with the screen. And I'll tell you all about, you know, how we are investing in the hardware and the platform. But let's be honest, the apps are what are going to define this. And I would like to introduce you to the greatest artist. And she's going to show you the art she's using. And by the way, MIT has some of these great courses and Stanford as well. going to be doing their biology courses, and they're going to be doing their engineering courses. Now inside of this, let's let the teacher speak for themselves and the artists speak for themselves. And in terms of productivity, you know, communications is everything, you know, here's zoom, and they bring zoom on and say, here's you. | I do. I 100% do. He has fallen into the, I mean, it is not the case that everything that is being built in the metaverse and for the Oculus Quest is actually just a universe where Mark Zuckerberg gets to be the god king, but it's way too easy to come away with that impression because he has made himself, I'm not even gonna say, there's no they here. He has made himself the face of this thing. He is sitting here saying, I'm the Steve Jobs of this whole universe. And presumably some version of him thinks that people like him enough to want to buy what he's selling. The best thing, like Facebook has a narrative problem. The best thing they could do is get him the hell away from this. Totally. Put somebody else in charge. Instead of trying to make him the Steve Jobs of it, because he's not. |
Because this thing is gonna fail so bad. Because of his leadership, I think, I think his leadership is really bad. And he doesn't have people around him to tell him like, Hmm, this isn't gonna work, dude. Education is the most impressive thing you'll ever see on this stuff. And he keeps thinking that it's walking around talking to people. And he thinks what happened on Facebook is now going to happen here. I don't buy that none of us buy that none of us want that there is not a Facebook equivalency to the metaverse. The metaverse is going to be I want to learn how to do open heart surgery. I want to learn how to, you know, do mechanical engineering, I just want to understand biology because I'm taking a biology course, man, when I'm in there, I'm learning faster. Okay, I want to travel, I'm going to be traveling to this area of the world. I aspire to go to Paris and Europe, I'm going to do a highlights. And then I'll plan my trip to Europe, based on the places I visited there that I actually want to see where I want to visit the Louvre. I'd love to walk around the Louvre or Pompeii, you know, there's places you're not allowed to go through anymore, right? I don't think you're allowed to go on all the parts of the Acropolis. But you can make a digital Acropolis where you could spend time there actually start a startup that was doing its own version of a digital Acropolis. could actually really spend some time in the Acropolis and then go back in time and hit a slider. Hey, show me what happened in the Acropolis 1000 years ago 2000 years ago, this stuff gets really fracking interesting. And he doesn't get that. He doesn't understand what this is going to be used for his use case. He's so blinded by the use case, and he's going to sink this company, they need to split it into two companies. put $50 billion in cash into Oculus and spin it back out and let it sink and swim on its own. And then bring Sheryl Sandberg back and let her do the collection of advertising based stuff and make her the CEO of the Facebook Corporation, which runs Instagram and WhatsApp. And split them, split them, they do. And they're not the same thing. And you need to have an app developer community that trust you. And he burned that bridge so many times that no developers are going to build for him because they know what's going to happen. if I built that Acropolis app, you know what's gonna happen, right? Lord over you, he's going to cut your throat, he's going to replicate it, he's going to copy it, and he's going to take 50% of your revenue, at least with Apple, you know, like, yeah, they'll copy some stuff every six, seven years later, they'll steal some WhatsApp feature, a snap feature to put in my message, but they kind of give you a seven year window to exploit stuff. And they only add it to iMessage when they have to because people are like, why doesn't this thing have gift support, you know, | Yeah, you're such a Yeah, using Yeah, right. He's got brand value. Like if he's up there, I'm like, Oh, okay, I'm this is real. And I'm into it. But just don't have Zuckerberg do any of it. I know that sounds kind of harsh. It's his baby or whatever. But the more the further you get him away from this, the better, specifically, even from a public shareholder perspective, because if that's all you see is him just only caring about this instead of the money printing machine, pretty soon you're like, is that thing gonna keep making money? |
Yeah. No 100. | Yeah, anyway end of rant. |
Well, because I think they're stupid about pricing and they don't get it. They're gonna charge 795. I don't know, but I'm guessing 795 699. | You got me on the vincenzo Endorse vincenzo last thing in the lightning round. We have a follow-up from a thing that we have been watching for a long time breaking news today beepy boop netflix announced pricing For its new ad supported tier called basic. Okay, so let's It's literally called basic basic. It's for basic. I know it's for basic bees. I know you're dying to buy this already. So if you know that netflix lowest tier currently costs $9.99 and it's like the resolution of a vcr it's like 480p or something about 720. Super embarrassing $9.99. I think yeah. How much do you think netflix is charging for its ad supported tier called basic? |
Okay. Yeah. 699 is pretty cheap. | You're close. |
I mean, granted, what they should lean over the lens. I have an idea for them. Okay. Make it $39 a year. Screw it. Yeah. Just let people buy by year. If you want this, you have to buy it for two years for $99. Boom, done. paying all that cash up front. | I mean, compared to 999 for no ads. |
I don't mind it so much. I don't I don't know if people can change that. But you got to give people something for upgrading, I guess. So wait, we're at you got basic to get no ads. Right? Okay. But if you're a basic B, yeah, you pay seven bucks, you pay seven bucks a month. | Even basic is capped at 720. |
What do you pay? | If you're a mid, |
I'm dopey, right? I'm dopey luxury, and I pay like $17 for shit I don't even use, like 4K. Yeah, same. I'm an idiot. | You pay $9.99. If you're a man, you pay $12? If you're a man, you pay $9.99. Assuming they're going to keep that tier. Got it. I don't think they announced that they're going to change the rest of the tiers. |
I gotta tell you right now, this is gonna work big time. I might need to J-Trade. I'm gonna J-Trade some Netflix. I can see so many people who currently are on Netflix, and they're gonna just be like, oh, six bucks a month? You know, they don't even put the 99 in there, you're mine just for six bucks. Eh, it's like a latte and a croissant. You know, even if you're a Dunkin' Donuts person, you're like, eh, it's two Dunkins. | I was paying, no, I was paying the $19.99 a month, and then I realized that's ridiculous, because there's like hardly anything even in 4K, and it's not like I can see it. I can't see it. I'm almost 50 for God's sake, so I dropped down to 15. |
You know, you know, donuts, I see, we have to use the proper coffee here. This is a dunking crowd. I love a good Dunkin Donuts. | I think if they're gonna do this, they should get rid of the 9.99 tier. Because the thing is, if I'm thinking $6 or $9, And the difference in resolution is exactly the same, but one has ads and one doesn't. Like, it almost feels like a trick to just get me to pay the 10. |
This is like for a dunking crowd. It's like the Boston guys and you do you like all the sugar you want all I get like sweet, but you get two doughnuts and a nice coffee for like you're in and out for six bucks, five bucks, you know, and you go to Starbucks, you get a school, you get a scone, right? You go to Starbucks, you get like a four or $5 coffee and a three or four hour scone. | Donkeys, donkeys. |
That's not happening No, that's like nine dollars, you know, if you go to dunking you're in and out for five six. This is for the dunking crowd That's what i'm convinced. It's great pricing. | They're getting like a scone in a flat white. |
They're going up. They were seven. They were I think when they started, they were saying launched at like six or seven. Yeah, yeah, but that's going to be their ad tier now. So that'll be their ad tier. And yeah, the pricing is now so if it's right, standard premium. Yeah, basic with ads, basic, standard and premium. I mean, can somebody just give me sick? Let me tell you something, anything that's more than two choices is two choices too many is one or two choices too many. Yes, they got to simplify this, just make it premium. Make it ad and premium. | I think it could be six If it's going to be 720p and it's going to be ad supported you do 599 because then they aren't you in the isn't Disney plus still in something insane? |
Well, that's because they do two shows a month. That's insane. | Oh, it was Apple TV that I was thinking of. Okay, so Apple TV plus is still 499. |
Oh yes. Okay. Boomer. Rachel, what do you got? | All right. There it is. Yeah. There you go. That's our lightning round. Now we got a, what do we got? We got okay. Boomer, right? |
But there was a bunch of different ones location and everybody was like, it was Foursquare, people were doing it. And then it was Twitter. And then there was like a periscope one or something. Not periscope the video, but there was another one. And it's basically all the same concept. You have your location, you chat, you see it on a map. And you know, you can then triangulate and find people and it's kind of fun, like, and I think people should bring these back. There was one called twist actually twist.com that my friend Billy had backed. That was really cool. If the three of us were going to go to a music festival, we would all load twist. Or if we were all going to a destination. So you know how ways you can send somebody or thing? Yeah. Imagine if ways allowed you on a group trip to just say, Hey, leave this on for the next 48 hours, 72 hours. And this has been built into iMessage. Now, I think you can share your location at the end of the day. | And that's what this is, right, Saturday? Same thing? |
We're going to get some nachos, whatever. Everybody enjoy this. | It was used for the Lower East Side bar call that I missed out on. I was gone the weekend, but it's exactly one of the use cases that actually a different OK Boomer guest, Andrew Young, used the app for. So it's already started in a week. Yeah. |
The kids call that a news peg in the industry. | We talked about the wing, which announced that it was shutting down for good in August and have a conversation about when you might want to intervene as a BC if you see a founder going off the rails when a project is about a founder more than it's about a business. And what are what are some of the moments that we can step in to keep you from driving your convertible off the PCH? |
I mean, just guidance. you know, during times of trouble is a great role for a board of directors. In fact, it's why they're there. And you have to wonder with the wing. Yeah, what went wrong here? Because this was such an amazing product, I think. And I don't know if you saw Molly, there was a little breaking news, which came out after we taped the segment, we taped the Sunday school, we don't actually get up on Sundays to the founder being sued for like a million eight or something for background. She signed a personal guarantee. When you sign leases, I mean, another piece of advice, you can never let the founders on a personal guarantee. Because in the case, this happens, this founder is going to go bankrupt, personally. | This is 100% a thing that we would have intervened on 100% as board members. Yeah. |
And then what do you have for your who do you have for the founder CEO discussion on Sunday? | Yeah, for this week in climate startups. I talked to Alan Chang, the founder and CEO of a company called Tesseract energy. This is super interesting. The goal is to generate affordable renewable power and solve climate change. No big deal by financing and building the creation of tons and tons and tons of renewable energy via token sales. Interestingly enough, this is like my second token conversation that I didn't hate. But also they're selling where in markets where they're allowed, they're selling energy direct to consumer at a huge, huge discount, which you can imagine in the European market where they operate, kind of a big deal right now. |
All right, it's going to be a great show. So we'll see you on Sunday. Have a restful Saturday, everybody. | Bye bye. Bye bye. |
Awesome. Thank good to be back. | And Vinnie Lingham. |
I mean, it is kind of extraordinary. It's not even gonna be about games. I'm just dropping something in our chat here. But this is a combination of VR and one of like AI generated art. So this is a real time room, Nick, if you can pull that up. Sorry, I'm just switching windows here. So the idea here is, Take a look at this. This is a real time room. I don't know if you're able to pull that tweet. | I get it. So before it comes up to describe it. Oh, here we go. So make that like five times bigger. Just make it full screen if you can. So the idea here is with these type of cards. you could speak like you can speak to Dolly or that Facebook text to a room. |
Yeah. | That looks like the Amman Hotel in Tokyo. And it would go figure that out. Yeah, pretty trippy. I we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, Molly and I, when we saw that Facebook, it was pretty obvious what they're doing. |
Yeah. So this is pretty incredible, right? This is being generated real time. And so you don't get kind of cheap backgrounds or anything like that you get an immersive environment. | Wow. If you're not watching this live or watching, you know, basically sketches render into a complete 3d room. |
The AI itself, yeah. | Yeah, this is all part of this big ongoing tech trend about how GPUs, the new CPU, because they can do this, it can like think, it's not linear, it's simultaneous. |
Yeah, definitely. You know, there's some laws that, you know, people should put out, but for the longest time, we had Moore's law with, you know, general purpose CPUs, right? You guys are all familiar with it. Every 18 months, you know, we'd have twice as much computing power. And I think with the chips behind this, because, you know, Tesla has their own chips, Google has their own chips, and you have general purpose GPUs from like Nvidia, I think we're really seeing all of that same law happen, but the compounding rate is even faster, I believe. And with this, it's not just related to compute, but it's memory, it's cloud, and it's all of that coming together. Because when you use any of those services, and they talked about this at the Tesla day, much of the power is not just what the core software of the AI, but it's also the infrastructure that they've built, right? What do they call their big AI machine? Jekyll? They have a name for it, right? | I'm slipping me now. But yeah, part of this is getting the data from the cloud, from storage into memory so that you can run these processes. So they have, like, a large number of Ethernet people going, you know, from computer to computer. So when they drop a simulation, they're like, hey, this turn on Market Street is absurdly hard. Let's just run a gazillion simulations based on everybody who's driven through it as a human. Dojo, right? Domo or Dojo? Dojo. It's pretty incredible. So they're building their own sort of racks to do very, it's really interesting to see hardware being built specifically for certain tasks. |
Yeah. And that's what's really kind of, that's what's exploding this, right? Because, you know, with Moore's law, you just had like the CPU getting faster. Now you have this combination of cloud infrastructure, network speed, and the CPUs. And so we should we should name it, we should call it something and then kind of brought up the data. | I'm going to start referring to data as data. Oh, fancy. |
Yeah, like, you know, my general thing when I see these things now, is, um, the core of it is AI driven and then there's like an editing layer on top. Right. And I think you see a lot of that even with, um, these AI generators, the really great, great stuff that makes you question someone's taken it and then put it through Photoshop or something like that. So my guess would be like, there was something that came out of a tool and I don't know anything about it as the first time I saw it, but it's something that came out of a tool and then they've done some, some tweaking to it to make it like, Imagine like, you know, like we do with the podcast, there's something recorded and then, you know, your team goes in and edits it. I feel like that's what's happened. I don't think it's like just straight out of the tool untouched. | I felt like this could be faked, Molly, I agree. I thought what they might have done is taken some keynotes. You notice how echoey it sounds like he's in a hall. So the corpus here may have been taken from the Steve Jobs keynotes. Remember, back in the day, they didn't have the same audio fidelity. You know, there wasn't production value at a lot of those early keynotes. It was just him on stage with a lavalier. So it sounds echoey Joe Rogan. I guess a Joe Rogan impersonation is pretty easy. But what they could have done is taken like audio books or whatever. And that said, have Joe Rogan asked this question, and then make an amalgamation of this answer from the Walter Isaacson bio, right? So they could have put the Walter Isaacson bio in there. So this really has to do with what data set you're putting in here, I guess. |
Send me the mp3 now I choose but the flip side is you know ways has this right you can have um, oh, yeah cookie monster But, but, you know, those I don't think are done with AI yet. And, you know, Google is really great at this. So I, my guess is like, there's a core thing that came out of a tool, but then there's some editing done on top. And even the greatest AI stuff out of these tools still gets edited on top. Right. So I think that would be my guess. | When does the polish kind of get added? Six months or six years? where we don't have to do that polish step that you're talking about? |
Oh, yeah, probably like 18 to 36 months. I think we don't have to do that. Yeah, because it's it's kind of it goes back as growing exponentially. Because as it sees more of because you can also train it on that, hey, this is what came out and this is how people did the polish. So the AI will just get better at completing that polish. You know what genre is going to be? | That's it for us, Jason. Like our salad days are almost over here. Perfect. |
You remember, Jake, I remember Max Headroom. Max Headroom? | Yes, I remember him. Yeah. He was awesome. You know where this is going? I think there's going to be an entire genre now. You know about the fan fiction where people would write like their own Star Wars or I started with Star Trek and Star Trek tried to stop and then Star Wars embraced it. then people started making short films. And Star Wars said, Yeah, you can make short films. Here's actually a kit to use the sounds from a lightsaber. Here's how to make a lightsaber and After Effects or whatever program it was. I think the way this is going, somebody who's a talented screenplay writer could write a a screenplay and then have it go to like storyboards and then eventually to like a fully finished version of the film. So the Mandalorian could have been written by a group of fans. Yeah. |
And just publish. Yeah. Wattpad does like some form of this now, right? | They do. Wattpad does that. |
Yeah. I think, I mean, not to that extent, but like, they kind of have a, they have fan fiction. Wattpad is for fiction. Yeah. But they've done some relationships with studios now, I believe. | Oh, yeah. I mean, it turns out Fifty Shades of Grey, I met the author of that at a party in LA, and my friend introduced me to her, and I asked her what the inspiration was, and she said, actually, it's a famous story. I'm surprised you don't know it. She was writing Twilight fan fiction. And it was Twilight Erotica that became Fifty Shades of Grey. She changed names back to her own characters. All right. There's a lot in the docket. I like this little AI, Taryn. Thanks. Thanks for buying your card, Vinny. Did you install it yet? Oh, you didn't get it yet. |
It's not gonna make any difference. It won't make any difference to Fortnite. | Well, no, no, no, no. Actually, actually, Sonny, I'm enjoying this. Are you running DLSS? |
Oh, dude, I play it off like a Nintendo Switch. | Oh, I play on a PC. It actually makes a big deal because I can't run ray tracing on Fortnite right now because the graphics card is too slow. So the ray tracing is a cool feature in Fortnite, but you can't do it because you can't get the frames per second you need. |
Yeah, go for it, guys. Not a shot. So I believe in and we, we should probably just maybe get into the definitions. But like, Well, the article that came out exactly this one is that they've started some type of investigation, which we don't know any of the details around, but like really, you know, what may be a good discussion. And, uh, I've actually pushed back to Jake and Molly, cause you guys spend a lot more time on this is like, what is the definition of a security? And then, cause that's what this all comes back to. And I sent something in the chat and maybe we can pull it up. And if we start there, I think it really will help frame the discussion. So. Sure. Let's, cause a lot of times it gets lost because people throw it around, but people fully don't really always understand what a security is. So Nick, I pulled that up. If you want to pull it up as a screenshot or whatever, like, so what is a security and, and. You know, when we kind of look at it from this perspective, right. Okay. It's fungible. It's a tradable financial instruments used to raise capital. Right. Um, you know, there's equities, there's debt, um, there's payments. Right. And, and so we have to really start asking ourselves like what aspect of what they've done falls into this. And so maybe let's, let's use that to frame our discussion. | Great. Yeah. I mean, equities in the United States, we know are regulated by the SEC. And they provide ownership in an entity, common interest in a company. And there's a series of laws around it. Right. And these are driven by the Securities Act of 1933. And, and yeah, go ahead. know, a lot of this dates back to the Great Depression, when people lost a lot of money, and they wanted to protect consumers. That's where accreditation comes from private. And of course, there's the Howie test. |
Well, one thing, Nick, you know, you pulled up the OpenSea page for an ape. Nick, I sent you a link for a StockX page for a sneaker. Yeah. Right. And you can quickly pull it up if you want. But and, you know, Molly, we were just talking about this before we started. This is almost the same thing. Now, is this a secure is this a duck? Right. And so because it's running the same way, you can look at the past sales, the current, you know, and so it's really that's what I'm saying. I think there's a lot more clarification required because it has all the same kind of charts. Right. You can look at the price over time. You can look at the trades. You can look at all those type of things. | And so this is OK. This is where, though, I really do want to read the Howie test. definitions because we have not gotten there yet. So we have one definition of a duck. What is the security? Then we have how we test, which I think will help us differentiate a little bit from sneakers, for example. So one, you do you have an investment of money that can be sneakers or apes to in a common enterprise. So assuming you're not also putting your money in Nike, then you don't necessarily apply to sneakers with the expectation of profit. to be derived from the efforts of others. |
Yeah. So that that's a little bit more of like, you know, all these things we're looking at starts to make it look a little bit more challenging now. Sort of the entire common enterprise of ape coin hasn't been fully disclosed yet. So we don't understand what it's kind of, it's all early. Right. And so I think that's the one that could be a little bit more, um, you know, I guess, gray area, then the, you know, sort of the Board Ape NFTs, especially because that looks more like a currency than a NFT does, right? And so, but Vinny, like, you know, what, what's your thought there? | None of us know. We're all surmising here. I'll use an example. We had a bottle of Chateau Latour a few weeks ago. I went to go buy three or four bottles of that stuff. It's expensive. I'm storing it and I'm keeping it. Maybe I sell it because it goes up in value. Maybe I drink it. Is the wine now a security? |
No, you know what, honestly, like what would be really awesome, I think, for all the listeners and just for ourselves is from our network, let's find like a, you know, a securities lawyer that's looking into crypto and maybe just have them on as a guest or something like that. I think it'd be really helpful for everyone because it's just so great. You know, we're obviously looking at Investopedia and Wikipedia and trying to figure this stuff out. It'd just be really helpful. | Well, one of the regulations they could potentially contemplate is not to say it's a security, but I was looking up your question about like, why isn't wine a security? If you invest in wine through, you know, some professional brokerage, or similar, it is unregulated, but it is it can be considered in this alternative investment bucket, you could imagine a scenario in which NFTs, the art as issued by an entity that obviously is dependent on the price of that art and the associated utility coins starts to fall into that alternative investment bucket and is regulated in that way. And we're probably moving towards some version of that. We're just like pretty early. Sonny, you haven't said anything in a while. What are you thinking? |
And I, you know, with Gary Gensler doesn't make it easy, Jake, how he very clearly says that Bitcoin is not a Bitcoin is not a security common enterprise, because it doesn't have like a central authority in it. | i don't think it's gray i think it's super gray i i think it's super you know all of you i'll tell you the tokens you know they should have all been i don't think that's going to wind up being gray um and then i when they're a common enterprise all those tokens i think are going to get regulated |
I think she took that all from our last episode. Right. | Boom. Just transcribed it. Yeah. You're welcome, Katie. |
No, no, that that's exactly it. Right. You know, we've talked about iTunes and when you have a movie there and if you decide to switch to another platform, well, what happens to all your stuff? You can't move it. What did you just rent it from Apple? That wasn't very clear. So I think she's, she's spot on. She's spot on there. | I mean, we almost had that. Remember, like we had our digital downloads, and they would all be trapped on like an iPod. And then we tried to figure out and then the market was like, it'll be more convenient. And we were like, it is more convenient. So then what happens? |
Maybe just like one more quick, small segue, but there was another big news yesterday that Google announced at their Cloud Next, which is their conference related to Google Cloud. which is in partnership with Coinbase, they are going to start accepting crypto payments. And so this is pretty huge from a perspective of, um, you know, if you are building something in and around and on the cloud, they're going to make that quite easy for you to accept crypto payments. And so this kind of pushes on the other side, right? You know, obviously Google huge company, giant legal, um, you know, probably department there. And so I found I found this really, really awesome for the ecosystem and to kind of drive innovation, because the more of that happens, I think it also drives the utility of what we see. So I thought that was really, really great. | Think of an example of what a developer would do in this regard, like maybe, you know, if you were dropped, if you put Dropbox into Google Cloud, yeah, and you accepted coins, then, or if you had like a general s3 layer storage layer or podcast platform, like how would this all work? |
So I think there's like, there's a couple of different ways this manifests one, let's just say I'm building a crypto related service. And that service is, you know, people are interacting with that service purely with crypto, no fiat. I can now pay GCP with crypto. Okay. Right. So that's, you know, so I don't have to kind of convert to fiat and do all that. I can just pay them with that crypto, which, you know, I think is pretty powerful, um, from, from the growth of their platform perspective. Um, so that's like at the infrastructure layer. Right. I think then, you know, take that app example, right. If I'm living in an ecosystem and that ecosystem is powered by, um, you know, like, uh, And, you know, we see this in different places, like look at a, um, an airline reward system, right? That's an entire economy that has value and everything associated with it. And so now that's not a closed system anymore when you move it to blockchain, right? It's composable, people can build on it. It's permissionless, right? Again, we talked about this last time. So I think enabling all of that to then interact with sort of the rest of the world via kind of GCP is really powerful as well. Now today, all you can really do with your Delta miles is using that example is by Delta tickets, or, you know, sometimes you can trade them in for like headphones and things like that. Imagine in this, you know, kind of world that we're heading towards those. Um, and it, you know, kind of ties back to our first conversation. Why aren't Delta miles, you know, a security or a currency. Right. And so, um, I think all of that just starts coming together. And I think these things help push the boundary of getting clarification around everything we're saying. | Yeah, they are very careful with airline miles to make sure they don't trigger securities. And part of it is you don't actually ever own them. So you get them, but they can be taken away at any time they can you can change the rules on them. If you die, you cannot give them to your kids. There's no inheritance of airline miles, but you can trade them right. So they're really, I remember going through this back in the day, because on Mahalo hadn't back in the day had Mahalo answers. And we did Mahalo dollars. And if people answered a question, and they got like 10 votes up there, we get a dollar, a Mahalo dollar, and then you could trade it in for, you know, like a swag, it was actually pretty amazing. But then of course, we had people, we put a gift card up there. And we said, if you know, you could trade 100 Mahalo dollars for a $10 gift card 10 to one. And And then that just the economy went bonkers. And we got all these groups that would ask a question, answer their own question and voted up. And so we literally had groups of people. And when they went to cash out, we found that it was the same one person had done this for like 10 hours a day. They had created multiple accounts. And they were taking questions, answering them from Yahoo Answers. And we killed their account. And they went crazy. |
So good. | It's funny, though, like when I think about to bring this all the way full circle, this is kind of The conversations we're having now are the conversations, you know, I pulled up the column I wrote in 2005 about Sony putting root kits on our computers to prevent CD ripping. And, you know, we're talking about gaming search engines, or we're talking about deciding which how this product is ultimately going to shake out and be consumed by individuals. But really, I think what we're coming down to is like, clearly, this is all this is all web three in action. It's all an evolving ecosystem. Fun fact, I was a Nominated for a digital magazine a national magazine award for this piece alongside Matt Taibbi In 2005 and I've never been more proud in my life and I was at the award ceremony and he was so rude to me Oh, sorry, but you wrote it with Matt Taibbi. No, I but he and I were nominated for the same award I was nominated for this piece for this big winner No, this really legendary old man, one whose name I can't remember, but it was everybody was like, this is his last chance. And so I think he died shortly after. Anyway, what I'm saying is, this is clearly the new internet, right? We're just figuring it's the exact same thing as when Jason and I were covering the early days of the web, like we're figuring out what the use cases are going to be, what the regulations are going to be, what the rules are going to be, what the adoption is going to look like, which is why this roundtable is so great. So great. Thanks, guys. |
No, we don't do that. We don't do that. We don't do it. I don't do it. | What coin should I buy? What coin is going to rip? What should we pump and dump? |
Yeah, I'm not like a finance guy in that kind of, you know, economics guy. | So I don't want to add to your Bitcoin position. What's really interesting is, I remember five years ago at Thanksgiving, a bunch of family members have this Bitcoin and remember it rocketed up over Thanksgiving to like, you know, whatever it was $20,000. And I had given the keynote in Santa Monica at this like, thing. And I said, Listen, I know some of you like this is the most life changing wealth you ever have. You have 99.5 nines in this. Just please sell half and let the other half roll. Fascinatingly, if you had held for five years, you are exactly even. It was trading at 1920. And here we are five years later, bananas. And that is bananas, it pull up the five year chart on Google, if you just can do a real quick, it's so insane, Bitcoin price, whatever. |
I will. I will. Thanks for having us again. | Enjoy this video card, Vinnie. Enjoy that video card. |
calendar with the chocolates in it. | When the snowpack lands in Tahoe, that's when I celebrate baby Jesus coming. That's truly when Jesus arrives for me in the form of fresh pow pow. |
Oh my goodness. Well, we're kicking off the show with a little bit of talk about internet access in the mountains and how pretty soon we're going to have redundant internet. It might not be from 5g, it might be from space. | Yeah, Starlink and Amazon's new satellite system is coming. And then we talked about Tick Tock, some interesting jobs were listed. That's how a lot of journalists find out these story angles, they look at the jobs. And it looks like they're going to have fulfillment center. So we talked about what Tick Tock might be up to in terms of e commerce. |
Such a fun interview today. Some good news. We're halfway through the week. Good. I'm spending the back half of the week. So when you see me in a different location tomorrow. Oh, we're going on a little Southern California leaf peeping girls trip. love it. I know. But don't worry, I optimized for an Airbnb with Starlink. So Oh, how nice. | It can be a little jittery on the uplink, depending on what neighborhood you're in. I have a Starlink right there. There. And that's going to go up in a week. And I got a router. I'm obsessed with these unify. I think they're called routers. We can put two internet connections and it fails over. |
Oh, that's such a good line. | Yeah, or you can have, I think you can have specific ports, you know, in your house, go to specific places. So I could say, Hey, put all the TVs where we're just downloading, put those on Starlink, but then things that are uploading, like our desktops, where we're doing zoom, have those be on the you know, cable. Yeah. So but it doesn't do it dynamically. Or I think you can do dynamic, where you can load balance. So if like, you know, a bunch of people there, so I got to play with it. But I think that this is going to be the future, I realized, you know, coming out, you know, it's gonna become the standard Amazon is having their I don't know if you saw their starlink competitors going up, and there's a third one. So there'll be three of these, I bet you somebody creates a satellite dish that allows you to connect to all three, and then bundles it. And you give you know, this is like corporations or whatever, or corporations will just put three of them on the roof of their buildings or hotels, they'll put three of them on the roof of the buildings. And then they'll have a fiber line or a cable line, and you'll have four different interconnections coming into a hotel. into the router. And then you know, hey, if one connection starts getting, you know, jittery, and you start to see the pings going up, you deprecate that when you use the other ones. And then the idea that you would lose internet is going to go away, I could see it being bundled, I could see you buy Starlink, and infinity and you get both your house now you never have to worry about just like people are going to be off the grid and have solar battery packs and generators. This resiliency in your home is so |
That's so true. And so overdue. And it is so interesting that 5g was supposed to be that right, it was going to be this like home broadband redundancy. And it's taken so long as being leapfrogged by stuff being shot into space. Yes, that's pretty embarrassing on the part of the 5g rollout. | I saw somebody like I think Verizon 5g is the the gold standard on this and it's so cheap. So I think what they're going for is like, hey, we'll give you like 5g at home for 25 bucks a month 30 bucks a month. |
Exactly. And that would be great redundancy, but it's just not it's not widespread enough yet. I mean, the fact that we are, you know, filling up low Earth orbit faster than we're rolling out 5g, I think is an under slightly under reported story for other folks to do. | If you just search, I've been seeing this in my Twitter feeds. I don't know if you're on this website, that twitter.com people can post what's going on in their lives. And know, I've been seeing people with Verizon, because they're so like, Whoa, check this out. I got 400 megabits down with this thing that's, you know, on my windowsill. And it's pretty dope for people who are city dwellers to have this. |
Right? I want that. But I just live on in the urban part of a major freaking US metropolis. So I don't have this. | Yeah, it's all this is what's great about this is this is going to create downward pressure on prices. So all this idea that you're paying 100 bucks for your internet is going to go, you know, to 50 to 25. And in places like Korea and Japan, $15 fiber, $30 fiber is kind of the standard because it's gotten to be so dogged. Yep. and i'm really rooting for verizon and for starlink to really give it to you know xfinity xfinity and what's the one in new york that's always down always and then there's like spectrum in la that's always down like your days are numbered out long last i also feel like they don't get great service, you know, and now all the service is getting better. I noticed with my Xfinity now, when they do go down, and you go to the website, Molly, they're on top of it, you know, and the downtime is like, okay, this is going to be 30 minutes. And it's we know that you're, it's just accurate, like they seem to have invested in customer support, as opposed to being like, you have no choice, why would we pick up the phone and tell you what's going on? |
And I'm like, Oh, super. Thank you. Yeah. All right. Let's do a little news. | Can you tell me what's going on in the news there, Molly? Because we do have today, as we mentioned in the intro, another next unicorns. |
Yes. And you want to stay tuned for this? Yes. Because it is the interview with the liquid death CEO. And I think like, fantastic. It's just a great interview. He's such an interesting person. And it also fundamentally is just so we talk all the time about backing builders, right? That's our slogan. We back builders. Yes. This guy, Mike Cesario. He's a brand builder. It's just a completely different type of builder that I think this our founder audience is really going to appreciate. He's just a brand genius. | I just love that as a great conversation, you have to be really great as a brand builder to have that actually be a superpower, like any developer, any UX developer, a good salesperson, like a good developer, a good designer, a good sales executive, like, okay, right, good product manager, you're looking to make a good contribution. But for brand, you have to be elite for it actually to move the needle and liquid death is clearly elite. |
Yeah, that's kind of what I like the startup takeaway. That's kind of what I love about this conversation is that like, it's a different kind of building. But not everybody can be a founder. Not everybody can be a developer. Hardly anybody can be a brand genius at this level. | Hey, Nick, this is something I wanted to do for ski season. I got some criticism somebody's like, Oh, I love Jay cow. I love this thing started, but they talk about the news too much. Not enough. I like the old days of this week and started with Jake, I would interview a founder for ski season. I want to lock in Nick to doing a series a solo dollar interview, maybe do it like Monday afternoons or something. Then we can book that for Thursdays or something. And then Molly and I get that day off. We don't have to do news that day. We recapture a day. And that means I can ski in the morning. Molly's giving me hearts. Thank you. I'm giving him hearts. I'm giving him what's in the news quickly. |
We got I get to Okay, tick tock appears to be planning to build product fulfillment centers. What in the US according to Axios and may be trying to compete with Amazon. Axios reported this story citing more than a dozen job openings related to this potential project on LinkedIn, over the past two weeks, this would mark tick tocks first move into e commerce, and could potentially be a whole new revenue stream. And obviously a whole new business for tick tock, who apparently is on the march to complete domination of the US economy. | Yeah, okay. So I think what they've realized there's a Chinese company. And yeah, tick tocks. The origination is China. And that's where they make fast fashion and fast gadgets, Amazon basics, all this stuff, you know, originates in the factories in China, Molly. So these founders and the they understand this dynamic, what they probably have also put together is that a lot of products are trending on tick tock, and then resulting in sales, whereas Amazon hasn't been able to figure out social media, And Instagram was not able to figure out commerce, right? |
Remember, Amazon was Instagram was going to own this business, and they just gave up they just recently, very recently, right, just totally backed away from Instagram shopping. They were like, we're not doing that anymore. And tik tok was like, Thanks, guys, we'll just | Well, you could have made it work if you went full stack. And so that's probably the issue here is going full stack is hard. And then there was also the, they might have given up because of the Apple, you know, stopping the retargeting and making it harder to do ads or whatever. I'm not sure exactly what the reason Facebook gave up and Instagram gave up on commerce. But this seems like a pretty good idea. |
Great idea. I mean, it really is like local fulfillment, So if you're not afraid of infrastructure, then this is brilliant. If you're meta, and you're just focused on the metaverse, and you don't think that the real world matters, and that people still want to buy real stuff. And to be clear, half of the reason that we still have supply chain issues is because of too much demand, people are still shopping for so much stuff, that we have backups as a result. And TikTok is like, yeah, I think we've figured out the American psyche, which is that they don't want to just be in the metaverse, they actually want to buy real stuff, and they want to get it quickly. And right now, there's really kind of only the one place to do that. I mean, people don't you turns out everyone just side note, you can get free one or two day shipping from target. Just just throwing that out there. Like I know no one knows, but you can, but everybody defaults to Amazon. And so it's very interesting and clever that tick tock would basically do one of the notice just said it's effectively fulfilled by Amazon. But it would be like fulfilled by | tick tock, just localize drop shipping, you know, all of these big companies start to dabble, because it seems easy. Remember, Google Go, Google had a shopping app that was going to be started on Google. And all it's like, now we're gonna try this and this and this. Well, and then they give up, right. And there was that whole thread on Reddit, where starting is easy, some PM, some product manager, some talented people do stuff at Google, it gets some traction, but not enough. And it just looks small compared to Google Chrome or Gmail, or or YouTube, you know, you just have this problem of things looking tiny in comparison to the largest decade long or multi decade products in the world. And then people give up. And it's just a hard thing to focus for a decade on something. So people focus for three to five years, and then they pull the plug because it hasn't broken out. I have a prediction and or recommendation, tick tock basics, tick tock basics, just start with cameras and phone related stuff, tick tock cases, tick tock, charging battery packs, just buy anchor, knock off anchor, whatever it is, don't knock off anchor, because I love that product. But you get the idea. Just do tick tock basics. Now when you're swiping through, you know everything about me. You know, I'm into cooking videos. That's my jam chefs reactions, my favorite channel. Okay, you show me a tiktok basics, you know, nonstick pan, you know, something to cook eggs, a knife, yeah, you know, but I wind up buying some of those cooking gadgets, I see them on tiktok. And then I go to Amazon. If I was in tiktok, I might actually one click to buy if it was like an interesting unique product. So I would the same way tiktok curates interesting content on an algorithmic basis, they should only do really cool viral products, things that you either like that's a staple or you know that they can put their tick tock thing on that's related to the tick tock brand or something really cool, right? Yeah, man, that would be amazing. |
And they have a million verticals to work within, right? Like if you're just so you're on cook talk, I'm on pet talk. And everybody on pet talk has their dogs trained to use those little buttons that that make words. | And the dogs will be like mom. I saw somebody doing that. It was like cookie. B word cookie. |
It's like totally. It's eerie, though, right? And then the dogs are just like now, now, now. But you could tell me that I would watch if I had just watched 13 of those like. | That's not real. They're putting the words in after. Well, no, they're not. Yes, they are. Yes, they are. They have the dogs come up and just hit them randomly. Then they put the words in. They do not. Also, you know, the people throwing the ping pong balls and it hits like all frying pans and then like lands on the top of the classic Coke bottle and goes perfectly into it. have a person on a green screen with a stick with a ping pong ball. And they're literally going bink, bink, bink, bink, and then resting it on the top. You monster. It's done with the green screen. |