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And it does make a lot of sense for there to be a vehicle to do that. I just wonder, like, did this backs end up being somewhat abused?

Yeah. So it, the basic problem, I believe, is that a lot of these private companies, maybe aren't ready to be public, because public investors are trading so frequently, they're not taking a 10 year horizon to mind their trade, their day trading them, right. So if you're day trading Joby, or desktop metal, or really future tech companies, Virgin Galactic, I mean, just think about those three companies, flying cars, Vitals, 3d printing metals, and I have desktop metal position, I still have my desktop metal position. And then Virgin Galactic, you know, space tourism, these are really futuristic things. These are we live in the future companies, right? You cannot buy those like and be looking at quarter quarter data, you got to be looking at decade to decade.

The thing had a name digital world, blah, blah, blah. And then there was a story that came out yesterday that said every single one of the board of directors has been issued a federal subpoena. All of them related to the spec. Yeah, related to what is was effectively appears to be alleged financial malfeasance. Yeah. Polestar was a SPAC says Justin.

we'll see. You know, we had the Trump's back, right. So people started saying, Hey, this is just an easy way to grip. And if you look at this, the, the Trump, what's it called truth, trumpet, whatever.

And we should Yeah, I mean, I think it would be fair to say that when to point out that when SPACs were conceived, and Chamath was one of the early conceivers, as my understanding, we had a pretty spicy interview on Marketplace about it back in the day. But one of the things that SPACs were created to solve for was the short termism, right? Like the idea that, like you said, not every company should be measured in this kind of quarter by quarter performance, that it's all that there could be a public market mechanism, that's almost closer to venture, the ability to fund something that is an idea and potentially a great one. And then because there were not regulations around this one that allowed it to exist, right, it could have been regular SPACs could have been regulated out of existence before they went anywhere. And that might have been bad. But because there weren't any really compared to IPOs, the promoters then found themselves in this position where they could take these huge deal fees. and then only ended up buying super insignificant portions of the company. Like there were some where the promoters would take a $50 million fee, but only acquire 1% of a $500 million company. So their deal fee would be 10 times higher than what they invested in the company. And all of that sort of combined, I think, the deal fees, the lower quality of the companies, the lack again, much like crypto, the lack of transparency. into how these things work combined to sort of maybe like put this stink on it, when it could have been a really important innovation and might still be.

Yeah. So yeah, this Digital World Acquisition Corporation. Yeah, that is the name of the SPAC. I remember. Yeah. So now it's down to this one had actually held up. Because remember, it had gone up to $90 a share 94 $97 a share as recently as March 4. Their market cap is now 907. But it was three or four times that. So this thing had a very, very big market cap at one point. And going public is... great if people are enthusiastic about your company. And then if the enthusiasm wanes, and your performance is not great, you don't ship the cars. You know, it's really, really you live by the sword, you die by the sword, as quickly as people can get excited and buy the shares, they can dump the shares that easily. Whereas in private companies, you don't really have the opportunity to dump the shares. As we just saw with the, you know, some of the stories previously about crypto, like this whole match machination needs to happen. where you figure out how you're going to keep the company running. And it's always private market investors. So just looking at the data and the clock running out. 118 companies are in definitive agreements. That amounts to 22 billion of the 181 billion of the combined trust of these specs. means 591 are still searching for companies that represents 158 billion looking for companies to take public 37 of those according to Bloomberg, who has all this data and has done the research have less than 100 days before they need to return the capital. So the clock is ticking on 37 of the 709 active specs 93 have 100 to 200 days. So you know, you're going to start to see every six months, some of these things get canceled. And the clock will run out and they won't have inventory. The vast majority of them raised between 100 and $500 million. And there are still seven of these facts and more than a billion hunting.

I mean, like a stock market kind of like a stock market, but yeah, But with less insight into the performance of the company.

Yeah. And, you know, you have all of these unicorns that, you know, are private companies in tech. Most of these facts work with tech companies, obviously, that's what the public was interested in. That's the inventory people want. So crunch base has over 1300 unicorns. They represent over 7800 $780 billion. Okay, so you put those two numbers against each other. you know, there's basically almost a SPAC for every one of these unicorns, if some of them are not in fact, unicorns. And so you I think, as an important question, like, why would people not want to go public, like, it's a great way to get money, you get that money. I think the problem is, it could cause chaos for your company, because now your company is publicly traded, you have all the expense of being a publicly traded company. And now you have all the scrutiny and then your employees are looking at a $1 or $2 share price and your company's worth 500 million or a billion and in a private markets, it was worth double or triple that. And you could quietly build without scrutiny. So the scrutiny works both ways, you know, getting all that attention could result in liquidation. The other thing that's going to be very interesting here is, I think maybe it's another counter theory if the market does, you know, I believe the market is bouncing along the bottom right now. And you know, yeah, we could still pull back 20%. We could pop up 20%. It's going to be like this sort of bouncing along the bottom phenomenon as people try to figure out which companies are going to survive, which companies are going to thrive, and which ones are going to shut down. Maybe there's a case that some of these unicorns are actually pretty strong, but they can't get private market funding. And actually, they can cut better deals with the promoters because if the clock is ticking, the promoter loses the $10 million it costs to set this up. And that's got to sting a little bit and all that work and time, maybe they could go and negotiate harder with the SPAC promoters, give them less carry, give them less shares. Yeah. And basically have the upper hand, because if these are all running out, then the they can grind these promoters down to whatever they want. I think if you're a strong company, when you're public, so The market is, you know, this is one of the great things about a free market is it kind of sorts itself out. And even in a down market like this, there's opportunities. And so this might be an opportunity for some company that wants to go public to use one of these facts and that money sitting there and but without consumers wanting to buy these companies, you know, you don't have the the bag holders, right? And so you don't have the buy side, which means, you know, the stock is just going to slowly get liquidated as all the insiders who are working at these companies who are early investors clear their positions might be a great way to start investing. I mean, if, if you think about it, if these, if all these companies were public, these unicorns, and they're all trading below value, you can freely trade them and have liquidity. It's like a really cool feature. I mean, people have it. Well, people have talked for a while, Molly about having a public exchange, a more fluid exchange in private companies. So what if you could trade private companies every month? So on the 15th of the month, you know, every private company stripe, etc, had an offering and a price was determined. And, you know, everybody could just trade in and out of it. What if that happened weekly? Well, here, what if it happened daily?

That was the Eric Reese project. I don't know if they should get him on and check in on that because I can't remember what. Yeah, I don't know if they're trading that way. It just raised $100 million today. Are you serious, Justin? Am I psychic? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, and with private companies, you they could just represent some top line numbers and buyer beware, if you're buying into private companies, you know what you're buying into, you have less rights, you know, you have less insights, but your money, you know, yeah. So people buy into SPACs, I said from the beginning, you have to understand you're buying into very speculative companies, and you have to be in them for the long term. So if you really did believe in desktop metal, Joby, Virgin Galactic, and it gets crushed, you would want to own more of the company as you know, whatever happened to the long term stock exchange.

I don't know. I mean, honestly, it's, you know, sort of closer to, in theory, how most financial advisors tell people to invest, which is just like, make bets and hold them. This is fascinating. It literally raised 100 or it was in the ticker today. Yeah, courtesy of producer Justin raised $100 million from James Walton, part of the Walton family. interesting. That is fascinating. All right, we should have Eric back on maybe to talk about this, because I've long thought that this was super interesting, but also not totally clear where he's going to go with that.

I am psychic Twilio and Asana are part of the long term stock exchange. And I guess they when you make a deal to do those, you make a deal with a company to hold your shares longer, right is the concept. So, you know, I still like his idea. But I wonder if consumers want it. I understand why businesses would want long term shareholders, but it just maybe it's overly complicated. I don't know.

Yeah, some of them are going to go private for sure winners in the ones that are up to a small number that are Yeah, I'm starting to see lucids in the wild. And every time I do, I get really excited because they're so freakin futuristic looking.

Top four performers in SPACs recently, MP Materials, up 259% CEO Jim Letitsky was at the Olin Summit, you remember him talking about minerals, Ipeak Energy up 108%. He was like, yeah, I bought a mine. Sure, Sarah Val therapeutics up 184 lucid motors up 80% 2060 specs are now down for down more than 90% over 60 or down more than 80%. So that's just carnage. And yeah, I mean, if you want to play VC, as a public market participant, as a retail investor, if you want to play VC, There's a reason why it's hard to get in VC and it's hard to keep your gig in VC. It's a hard. It's a hard business. And you know, you need to have 2030 bets. And you need to get in at the right price. And here, maybe people got in at the wrong price. And maybe they had three or four bets. And maybe they're looking at a one year window, not a 10. So Yeah, I think people are treating these like public companies with much more proven, you know, and that's the things consumers were not educated on to how speculative these are. But I bet you there's going to be some winners in those ones that are down 90% or 80%.

Not year over year, literally like last quarter to this quarter. And then the total amount of dollars invested in startups dropped 27%. They didn't specify the total dollar amount, but they did note that it's the late stage startups that are getting hit the hardest. Funding in Series D rounds or beyond dropped 43%.

Q1 of 2022 to Q2.

And then when we noted that we were going to talk about this on the show today, Overlook to BC founding partner Brandon Brooks on Twitter replied and said, I would love VC is not a descriptor. That's the name of his fund. It's the name of the fund. Yes, totally. I mean, it just Yeah, when you say in a sentence, it's true. It really does sound just like some nouns. But in fact,

Yes. So that's the new market participants that Tiger Global is coming in paying whatever price not really being too discerning. Those people are out of the market. And so that's why the percentage of dollars is down so much makes total sense. And pitch book will have their cue to at some point in July, we have a good relationship with them. We'll break that down when they release their data. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And said, in response to us, just in time, would love someone to address the outsize slowdown for black founders as well. The latest stats say only 1.2% of venture capital has gone to black founders year to date. Yeah. Is there anything that can be done? He asked to help the slow progress we've seen over the last year continue as in there has been progress. It was very slow. Are is this going to be one of the first places that funding drops off? And in fact, a few weeks ago, there was an article in Fast Company titled after a brief streak, venture capital has ditched black startups.

I mean, it's both Brandon is very overlooked. No, he's his firm is called overlooked. Yes.

view of that sometimes when people are sharing their statistics, but it sounds like you're saying that that would get manipulated to the upside, suggesting more investment in black founders that actually is, which is not a good story.

Um, yeah, so these numbers, you know, it's, it's hard to parse the numbers. Perfectly here. The definitions really matter. because some people will play games with is the founder, a person of color, or is there a person of color on the founding team? Or are there three or four founders and what defines an actual founder? So the founder has 1% and they happen to be black and the other two founders have 25% Are they actually a founder or not? So there's a lot of detail work here that can be manipulated. And I get an up close and personal

The dollars can be distorting, but would you? The dollars would distort it, as opposed to the just number of deals. I suspect, though, that you wouldn't dispute that black founders receive a disproportionately smaller share of venture dollars, and that while there may have been progress, it would be sad to see that progress go away.

Well, no, it depends. It depends on which side of the table you're on and what your agenda is in many cases. So let's say an accelerator that wants to have great numbers, they might look at what I think I told my team to say, like, just make sure the founder owns more than if, if you're counting somebody as a co founder, I think 5% is a minimum, you know, maybe 10% is at the earliest stages of a startup, of course, when companies when they exit, you know, all the founders of history founders might own 5% 10%. So I'm talking about very early when founders have a bigger piece. And then on the other side, people will look at the dollars and the problem with the dollars as opposed to the deals. I would encourage people to look at the early stage deals if you want to look for the trend, because the trend will be seen first in early stage deals. You can't have an underrepresented group close a series e because those happening year five, if you know, we're looking at this or close their third fund. So you have to look at is of new funds of first time fund managers of seed stage companies, what is the percentage look like? In turn, what you look at, what is the percentage look like of, you know, early stage founders, let's say series A and before or seen before, that's where you'll see the trend happen, you're not going to see the trend in the dollar number. Because typically, when we do these quarterly reports, one huge deal like a coinbase deal, or an Uber or an Airbnb private deal or stripe private deal, those things can be a third of the money. So they really can throw the statistics.

Okay, I'm not sure what to do with that information. It sounds like I mean, right, like, true. And also, there have been new mechanisms for underrepresented founders and CEOs to raise money. Are you saying that those are going to go away?

course, yes, these two things can be true at the same time. And then there is the issue of, you know, I think a lot of folks are saying, I should be able to raise in my first fund from Harvard's endowment or this endowment. And I've talked about this on the show, though, you know, Yale or Harvard or those places, they want to see three or four funds worth of data before they take on a new fund manager. when you're doing a new fund, you do high net worth individuals, and maybe the long tail of family offices. That's typically how this is done for white males, and for every other, you know, category of fund managers. So you can't kind of jump that process, because those large institutions have a process where they add one new fund manager year to new fund managers a year. And I think there's a lot of hand wringing about that, like, why isn't this giant endowment just putting money into work in these new funds? It's just never how they've done it. They want they need to see three years, four years before they get past their board of directors, their investment boards. So if you're on your first fund, you can't expect to have Harvard in there. They've never done that. Or CalPERS, whoever.

And so yeah, totally, I get it. But I would say at some point, we don't want to be arguing for like, why that's the case, and will always be the case and should be the case, right? The question is, is, has this small uptick in funding? Are you saying that the small uptick in funding doesn't exist? Or isn't a real wasn't a real trend to start with? I think there's been a real trend how to parse this in a way that leads to positive provocation and, and my theory is on founders.

No, the the year we've seen more funds that more new funds have been started in the last two or three years and probably in the last 20. So we have a massive boon of new fund managers who you know, are not white guys from Stanford and Harvard. So I think we're seeing a lot of that. The other issue will be, I'm just telling you the, the nuances of the of the numbers.

It was really interesting, actually, when we had Monique Woodard on one of the things she talked about was that she would meet with LPs who were there's that there is like a there is a need to check the box. And that she talked about having LPs who were frustrated that she was not only investing in black founders or underrepresented founders because they wanted, I think at the time I said, oh, they wanted the twofer, right? They wanted to get credit for both of those things. At the same time, investing in a black venture capitalist, and also, by extension, investing in and she was like, actually, I plan to make the most money possible and invest in everybody I possibly can. And they were like, Oh,

Yeah, my theory of what's happened is, because this has been such a prominent issue for the last decade, we've seen a lot of new fund managers funded. And I think a lot of people are going to wait and see how those fund managers do before giving them larger funds. That is the normal process. So that is going to be one of the issues. There is another issue, which people don't want to talk about, which is if you start a fund, and you limit who you're going to invest in, that is not particularly attractive to people seeking a return. So if you start a fund to only invest in a certain demographic, fund managers I've talked to, who would never say this publicly, I'm talking about LPs, they don't like that strategy. They want you to meet with every person possible and place the best bets possible. So when you create a fund that's only going to invest in a certain group of people, the sad truth is LPs are maybe going to put a token amount towards that. And that's literally how they look at it. Like, I know this is cynical, but maybe like they checked a box, like I did my part, I gave a little bit of money to this. but I actually don't believe in that strategy. And they won't say that publicly. And so that's part of what's going on behind the scenes. I'm not saying I endorse any of this. I'm just trying to be honest about the back channel that I see.

Yeah, I mean, I think you have to because I think All of that is 100% true and math, you know, as I have written on a post-it and I'm keeping next to my bed and thinking about all the time, math is a harsh mistress. Like, the truth about math is real. And also, some people will be bailed out by their LPs or extended further benefit of the doubt. Yeah, then other so when there's a pullback, it is very likely and this is I think what people are pointing out that underrepresented investors and or founders may get less of that extension. Yeah. It sounds like what Arlen is saying in some ways is Yeah, hi. I'm one of them.

Henry Perry Jacques from Harlem Capital, great name, said on twist that they're focused on underrepresented founders. But if Zuckerberg walks in the door, they're not going to pass just because he's white. And he was sort of upfront about this. So this is I think, one of the hard conversations. Monique had the opposite with some help ease. where, you know, people want to do the right thing. Some people want to do it just to check a box. And then the nature of what we do is we're judged ultimately on our returns. So now no matter what people say to you, matter what they say on Twitter, at the end of the day, the reality is this is going to be based on numbers for all of us. And will certain people get the benefit of the doubt? Will certain people start in second base? Will certain people have a fraternity brother or sorority sister do them a solid and squeak them in ahead of time or get them a bigger allocation? Of course, the world's unfair. Nobody's saying it's not. But ultimately, the numbers are the numbers. And so what we've seen is there are some women in the industry, because 1015 years ago, we're talking about how underrepresented women were in the industry. There are some women who crushed it, who now have billion dollar funds. And so they're there. And I think two of the largest funds recently were both started founded by new funds were founded by women. So there is this let's call it 10 years, 15 years of this delay, that we will see in which fund managers actually were able to make it happen and which ones didn't make it happen. And you know, it's very random strategies matter timing matters luck matters. Yeah, I am fully confident that we're going to see a large group of people who are underrepresented raised billion dollar funds 10 years from now, but it is going to be a 10 year process. And that's how these LPs work. When they turn me down, when they turn Arlen Hamilton down, when they turn everybody in between down, they will basically have the same story. We want to get to know you for three funds. Yeah, that's it. And I listened to Arlen's, you know, podcasts, and I've had her on the show, and we're friendly. I don't know if we're friends, we don't like hang out socially, but we're friendly. And, you know, we get into it sometimes. But she was just lamenting how like, LPS have not shown up for her. But she has had a lot of LPS. And she she actually called them out by name on her pod. which was highly not interesting. I've never seen that before in the history of venture capital. So but these are large LPS. And so, you know, she is kind of publicly challenging them to step up. So maybe there is something to, you know, what she's saying is like, well, why won't a large endowment, take more risk, and make this change happen faster. And, you know, she might have a point there.

So totally, there are lots, I would just say there are lots of realities at play here.

Right. Um, Yeah, and I have sympathy for her. She, you know, she puts it out there. And it is hard to be a fund manager, because you could have a fund that doesn't perform, you could get a lot of just like founders get a lot of nose, man, the number of nose I've gotten, and the number of, you know, two meetings, three meetings in with the largest endowments in the world for them to say, hate to say this to you. We know you're Jason Callaghan is we know you wrote the book on angel investing. We know you have the podcast we know you hit Uber and calm and this and that. We couldn't get there this time. We know that will like literally we know that might upset you and you may not let us in next time because we know you're not going anywhere you're gonna be successful. But we can only allocate a certain amount to venture we're over allocated. We're saying no to a lot of high quality people. We're really sorry. like literally people were nervous to say no to me I hear it in their voices and these are like not know, de minimis people in the world, these are like senior people. And, you know, they're like, we have to answer to this group of people, we have this board, we have this committee, we get to bring them, you know, two or three new requests a year. And we're getting a lot of nose. And we're, they're asking us to liquidate stuff. And you know, yada, yada, yada.

I mean, the context here, which we didn't say is that she had to lay off almost all of her team.

I my best advice for folks is to not give up and to go the syndicate route. If you're so good, that you can just pull together these syndicates. And you can say I found a great company, and you can email 100 people. I don't want to tell people that their suffering isn't real or that the world is unjust. I'm just telling you the path that I think is the clearest, clearest path. So just to be clear, because I know white guy giving advice to everybody might be taken a certain way. And I'm not just saying like work harder, but work harder. It is literally like if you hustle, and you do these syndicates, it is such a clear path. Because all you need to do is get 100 people to give you $5,000. And now you got a 500k investment. That's completely possible. Whereas convincing the giant, you know, $10 billion, $20 billion endowment, you have to get so much buy-in from so many people, and they just might not like you. And Arlen said this, like, maybe it's me. You know what, Arlen? maybe it's me too. You know, like, we're very similar in that we're outspoken people, people may not want to associate with Arlen or me, or other outspoken people with sharp elbows who say who get in fights with Palmer lucky or, you know, who are outspoken and have a podcast every day, they may not want to take that on, they may want a quieter person. But you know, you just got to put it in their faces. That's what I do. That's my approach. I still got a chip on my shoulder. I know Arlen's got a chip on shoulder. I'm her level of energy and dedication to her founders is extraordinary. And I think the world will rally around her. $5,000 checks at a time, just like it has for me, you know, and she's undeniably talented. And so I wish her the best and keep your chin up. She was saying she was a little down on her podcast.

Yeah. To three, which is absolutely brutal.

Oh, sorry about that. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, backstage, like, I think 17 to three is from down from 12 staff.

It's a legitimate, I mean, you're stressed out about us and your company and your team too. Like everybody is terrified of that exact thing happening. And so, it is only love and sympathy for those to whom it is already happening. Because any of us, you know, there but for the grace of God.

It's brutal. Yeah. And we're going to see this over and over. And she said, she's also burnt out. So take care of yourself first and foremost, you know, uh, Arlen. And when you come up for air, happy to have coffee and talk strategy. Anytime you have my number. Um, and I am 100% certain she will remain an incredible force in the industry. And sometimes you take a step back or two steps back and then you come back and you just lap the whole pack and all it takes is one. All it takes is one. So she's got 200 companies, one of those is going to pop. And the whole narrative changes. And you know what, maybe it's the 200 first company. And that's what that's how I think about this. Because I mean, looking back, like, did I know, I had a feeling about comment feeling about density. But if you told me like, a cab app, and a stock trading app that was free, and an email competitor Gmail, that was $1 a day, a meditation app, these were going to be my big winners, I couldn't figure that out. Right. So I think this is the time, you know, be resilient, and just keep doing the work and keep placing those bets, man, that the combat is the one that comes to mind for me, that was a $376,000 bet. I mean, $376,000 not a lot of money in venture. Yeah, it's a nine figure position. It's over $100 million in value. You hit one of those the world cannot deny you, you know, forget about the ubers, you know, you hit one of those 250k slugs becomes a unicorn, my Rome, you know, this is a big deal. It can become a big deal. And then you know what, You don't need anybody i'm putting up two fingers here i'm pointing with my pointy fingers you don't need anybody this that's one of the great things about this industry just need those hundred lps. And she's got a syndicate so everybody should join her syndicate just do a google search for backstage capital syndicate join her syndicate subscribe and i wish you the best of luck. It's gonna be a hard time. A lot of people are going to go through hard stuff right now. This is another public service necessary to say right now. I know it's easy to dunk. I am a super critical, candid person. I am very judicious with the dunks. I do not dunk on people just because they failed. If I'm going to dunk on somebody, it's like Elizabeth Holmes, because they did something abhorrent or tether, because I feel like they're doing something, you know, that is unnecessarily opaque. You don't see me or I might dunk on crypto bros saying have fun being poor and being gnarly. But just be careful dunking, you know, it's like a really dark time right now. And this is people's real lives, you know? Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Anyway, I'm sorry, I'm getting a little emotional myself about this. I have strong feelings about it, you know.

The good news is the future is always coming. The future is always tomorrow. All right. We live in the future. We're going to end on a cool note.

Yeah, I mean, I am 51. I've seen this movie three times. Yeah. I prepared both my companies for it. Years ago, I communicated that to our team, we're going to stay small, we're going to stay nimble. We're not going to have some huge burn rate. I'm not going to raise a ton of money and have this, you know, get ahead of my skis. I'm going to keep these things very tight focus SWAT teams at inside and launch. And yeah, now I'm like, okay, let's just be super focused going into the storm. Let's make sure we batten down the hatches to make sure we got our provisions will be fine. You know, but you know, it's, it's, uh, not everybody has that luxury. I have that luxury after two or three wins under my belt, but I can, I mean, I could fund my companies myself personally. So, you know, I have like a backstop to a backstop to a backstop. Um, but not everybody has that much, uh, you know, if they're in the start of their career. So be kind to people and, you know, we live in the future. So there's always this amazing thing.

Okay, go from $8 to $12 to $22. That's, that's growth.

The whole show was like things coming apart. Do you realize that? It was like, here's everything going down. But this is where the opportunity is. But this is where the opportunity is. My Lord, we're seeing great companies, 57 companies, my team did first meetings with us, we're open for business. We want to invest in companies at the right price with the right management teams with a great product with great customers, maybe 25 to 250 k a month of revenue. That's our sweet spot. Reach out to Molly would reach out to Jason. Let's go people looking to do two deals a week and I'm looking for deals just have some traction. Just a little traction that we can help you accelerate.

Find another sucker. Find another sucker. If you didn't get any revenue turned on.

I mean, it is interesting, you know, people with to belabor the point even more, you know, the the people who were like, Oh, you have 25k a month in revenue. Oh, you're, you're doubling it every six months. That's cute. Oh, you're gonna get to, you know, you know, 100k a month in revenue next year from 25k this year, you're gonna for exit. Oh, that's very cute. Those companies that were dismissed because they weren't you know, writing white papers or talking some big game. Those are the companies people now are like, tell me more. Tell me more. Oh, you're gonna go from 25 to 100k a month in revenue. Could you get to 150? Do you think? Great. What's your burn? Oh, wait, you hit profitability last month? Oh, no, really? Oh, tell me more. Now, if you put a million dollars into that company, you're like, well, this person is really, you know, good at spending money. They spend money wisely. That's kind of a cool person to give money to. And you have the downside protection. They could make cuts that get them to break even their default alive. So for the founders who are grinding it and have actual revenue, congratulations, this is your time. To the bull**** artists,

So anyway, one of us could be finding and funding this apparently real thing. I'm sure you saw it. It's almost certainly not real. Anyway, but futurism.com posted this video, a concept video of a flying nuclear cruise ship called Sky Cruise. I think that this was literally like posted as an exercise in sci-fi imagining, but why not? Honestly, we can use it. Filmmaker and producer Hashim El-Ghaili is best known for making infographics and videos about scientific breakthroughs. His YouTube account has almost 500,000 subscribers. And he posted this clip, which will play if you're watching us on YouTube or on Spotify. What I mean, what's so awesome, by the way, about this video is how really made it look as a concept video.

Yeah. Okay. We live in the future.

Snowpiercer. Bummer, which I don't but yeah. So what it looks like if for those of you who are not watching is it's kind of like a little bit Starship Enterprise meets maybe the Avengers. plane floating thingy. And it's got a like a spinning sky deck. And it's a super beautiful luxury hotel. And people are just standing by the windows as they like float over the sky. And I think in his video, he described 20 electric engines powered by a small nuclear reactor that uses a highly controlled fusion reaction. So it's not fission based, right, which is the nuclear energy that we're all familiar with. It's fusion based, which is the nuclear energy that does not yet exist.

Yes. Feels like, you know, the beginning of a science fiction movie, like it could be the fifth element, or it could be, you know, yeah.

Was it Regency? The... Regent.

And, you know, we are seeing a bunch of activity in transportation. Obviously, SpaceX has talked about using their rockets for point to point travel seems a little crazy. But, you know, after they, you know, they're doing a large number of these rocket launches, and over time with reusability, you know, maybe it could be feasible that if you wanted to go from Texas to Tokyo or Sydney in an hour, you could literally take 300 people on the tip of a rocket. Boom! Supersonic is doing, you know, bringing back the Concorde, essentially. Sergey Brin from Google has got an airship company, Lighter Than Air. You had Regency on Sunday, right?

You are hilarious. I love how you're like, we're in the future. And then you're like, I have a lot of questions about this BS right here.

region, sorry, region, doing ferries that fly 50 feet above the water. So there's a lot going on in this space. This seems insane, because why would you want to stay in the air for a year? It doesn't make any sense. How much risk would there be in something this big? You know, flying around the world like it just seems unnecessary. I don't know what the mission here is like. And when I say mission, not like a touchy feely mission, but like the actual like destination and goal, like I don't want to be circling the globe for a year or a week, I want to go somewhere in land. And what size runway does this need to take off for land. But it did remind me of two science fiction moments. Number one, fifth element had a ship like this. That was a pleasure cruise, like, so these are like cruise ships, barge and pull up an image of that maybe. And then there was the aircraft carrier in the Avengers, right? And the aircraft carrier in the Avengers, actually, people want to build something like that, specifically to launch drones. So I think the Defense Department is working on you know, something like that. Yeah, something like a, a float and an airborne aircraft carrier. So other planes could fly off of it. But again, you need to have a lot of power to keep these things up in the air. I mean, it's, it's interesting.

So this really is just an anti cruise situation. I'm opposed to the cruise vibes idea of conceptualizing what could happen with portable nuclear fusion reactors that you can plug into and have this wonderful thing and all Jason can make is like norovirus norovirus norovirus norovirus.

I'm not buying this. I mean, I do like the idea of electric engines. I think that's going to be great. We're going to have those and Cape Air bought some electric airplanes. And then Regent has electric. So I think electric engines is one component of this. Fusion is the other. Fusion is the other interesting one. And the thing I don't like about these is I hate cruises. I have a couple of rules, you know, no buffets, no all you can eat, no cruises. These are things that I find abhorrent. I never want to experience. I don't want to be at an all you can eat buffet people touching the food. It's not for me. All you can eat sushi.

I want we are out we have more amazing content coming for you.

I just don't want I don't like I don't like large crowds around food. I like great food served intimately. You know, bespoke crafted, it could be barbecue, it could be omakase, but no, no on the big buffet fifth element cruise ship was that was really nice though i do like fifth element all right if you have any ideas for we live in the future you find any interesting videos or stuff like that on reddit or you don't say we want to live in this specific future but tell us more about the future you can send them to us send them to us producers my personal health yeah pretty good. Fogo de chow on a cruise ship served by tick tock employees, which is of course the Brazilian meat. I actually went to a Fogo de chow and there was one cut of meat I found great. I the idea of going and eating all the meat you can, and getting the meat sweats and like, having to not eat for like, my friends were like, Yeah, we're not gonna eat for two days, we're gonna fast, and then we're gonna go there and do all this stuff. And then at Fogo de Chao, you have a card, one side's red, one side's green. So if you want meat, you flip the green card up. If you don't want to be bothered with more meat in your face, like slicing, just they're just constantly assaulting you with different cuts of meat. It's over the top. Why are you laughing? For me, you might love it.

And Molly, you have an interview coming up that I've been trying to book for ages. I'm so excited. Thank you, producer Rachel for making this happen. Ohm Connect co founder Matt Duesterberg is this really interesting company that is, you know, TLDR say it paying people to save energy. If you have questions for that that's coming up on this week in climate startups, but tweet at me before 2pm on Wednesday at Mollywood. It's just my name.

Tune in tomorrow. I'm going to chat about markets with Michael and Josh Brown. Subscribe on YouTube by going to this week and startups.com slash YouTube. So we're gonna do a live crossover collab and answer some questions about the markets.

Tomorrow. Bye bye.

We're going to do a lot of interviews this summer. So if you have ideas for founders, investors, or scientists or authors you would like us to have for the summer series as it were, for when you're at the beach and you want us to hear us interview somebody producers at this week and startups calm. See you tomorrow.

Yeah, and Kim is not just a lawyer focusing on reproductive rights. She is also an angel investor. So there's a whole bunch of tech and startup angle to this. Also, it's a great conversation. Kim was amazing. And then related today's startup of the day is Stardust, an end to end encrypted period tracking app, privacy for your period people.

And today we're going to bring you Kim Clark. She's an attorney at legal voice. And she actually reached out to Molly over LinkedIn after listening to our shows, where we mentioned we talked about the impacts of the surveillance state regarding healthcare, privacy, notably, abortion. So we're gonna talk a little bit about Roe v. Wade at the top of the show.

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Absolutely. And then we're going to cover some non Roe v. Wade stories as well. Zen desk is going to be acquired by an investor group and an all cash transaction valuing them at about $10 billion. That is a true sign of a bottom when private companies with a lot of cash, a lot of revenue, public companies get taken private. So we'll have a little talk about that. It's gonna be a great show. It's a great show. Stick with us.

yeah maybe kim jump in there and tell us a little bit about what legal voice does and how this is so you know related to the work that you do yeah of course so uh i am senior attorney for reproductive rights health and justice at legal voice which is a legal advocacy organization that advances gender equity throughout the pacific northwest through high-impact litigation, policy advocacy, and legal rights education. So my work focuses specifically on reproductive rights and spans the entire Pacific Northwest. And Jason, to answer your question, so we've all heard that there are 26 states that are basically poised to ban abortion with the issuance of this decision, and it just varies by state whether, you know, at which point those statutes go into effect. Um the closest state to i'm in the state of washington the closest state to washington that has an abortion ban Is idaho that statute goes into effect 30 days after the decision? um, although it's actually going to take a little bit longer than that because it requires judicial action, but Um, it just varies it varies by state in some states. There are prosecutors who are already seeking to enforce the bans um, it's Suffice to say it's going to be a lot of work for lawyers

Yeah, it's, it's kind of shocking, even though we had four months to prepare for this with the leak. And I guess, you know, right off the bat, all of these laws that were, I guess, as well, Marley, all these laws that were on the books that I guess these trigger laws, I'm trying to understand, I've been hearing on the news, so much different information. Some people are saying there's there 30 days, some people are saying they've they're triggered, and they're actually on the books now. What is the state of affairs? Can anybody explain to me, you know, where we're at? Here we are on day three of the after the ruling?

That's a great question. And I think the answer is, unfortunately, the law is less well settled than even most of us lawyers might have assumed. So that is the question that advocates across the country are really grappling with. And I think it's just going to play itself out in the courts over the course of, you know, the next, you know, the immediate future. And that's part of the reason I say there's just going to be a lot of work for um for lawyers, but but that is um That's a huge concern. Um Certainly, you know for for providers. Um You know, but also for people who are helping Step folks to cross state lines in order to access care, right?

And when we look at the like Idaho, as an example, I guess the question is, how aggressive do you predict these states that are banning abortion or putting additional regulation are going to be in terms of pursuing folks who leave the state to have an abortion? this seems to be at least from all of the Sunday shows I listened to the big debate or question, you're obviously on the inside of this. So what does your gut tell you? Because I don't know that there's precedent for this, right? Like, or is there precedent of, you know, some prosecutor from Idaho, going into Oregon, or, you know, wherever?

That's right. And I think all of those are open questions, really. It's really a question of how the state law is written, to what extent it imposes a better liability, and then how aggressively states will pursue claims against or seek to assert jurisdiction over conduct that takes place. even outside of their borders. So all of those are legal questions that have yet to be resolved, but I too have been really, um, encouraged by the number of employers who have come out to offer those kinds of supports. I think there are also major questions about how those programs will, um, work, how the mechanics of that will work without, you know, violating, um, the employee privacy as well. Um, but I, you know, I'm... What do you mean by that? I guess, uh that in order to take advantage of those benefits, um, you know, how do you do that without disclosing to your employer that? that's what you're doing.

Yeah. That's crazy. I mean, the hate to be an optimist in a dark time like this, but it's just kind of how my brain works. One of the things I thought was super optimistic, or made me at least a little bit optimistic this weekend was the number of companies that came out and said, we are going to provide explicitly an abortion benefit, we're going to pay $4,000, whatever it is. I mean, and this was not like, you know, a virtue signaling small group of small companies. This was JP Morgan. This was meta. This was Yelp. This was Levi Strauss, Tesla, Microsoft, Starbucks, DoorDash, Lyft, Bank of America. I mean, it was essentially you know, every major company, almost every major company you could think of, came out and said, Hey, explicitly, we're going to do this. So does that mean these companies then by providing that are explicitly you know, thumbing their noses at and challenging these leak these state legal regulation. Yeah, the incentives of the of these states. I mean, it sounds like they're really saying, Hey, this is outrageous. We're going to challenge us because hey, we have unlimited resources to fight a legal battle, whereas some individual might not.

It's also a great segue into this surveillance question. and all of the ways that our technology now makes this hellscape even more hellish. One of the most straightforward things that has come up in recent months since the leak draft was period tracking apps. But what are we not thinking of around all the ways that we can sort of be stalked?

Yeah, which can, you know, could put the employee at risk, as, as well as the employer in a normal situation, you would go to your healthcare provider, and they would obscurify that from the HR department. Now, now the woman has to go to the HR department, say, Can I have my benefit? And that is something they may not want to share with the HR department. Exactly. Such a good point. Okay, everybody, it's summer of 2022. And right now is a great time to grow your small business. LinkedIn jobs is going to help you find great candidates faster. And your first job post is free. You heard that correct. Now, of course, you know, LinkedIn jobs is the best hiring platform out there. And we use it all the time at launch and inside. In fact, we're hiring another producer for this very show this week in starters. What makes LinkedIn jobs so good? Why are we so obsessed with it? Well, you know, LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network with over 810 million people. When we started these ads, I think it was at 300 or 400 million, you can create your free job post in just minutes and add the purple hiring frame to your LinkedIn profile. So everybody knows you're hiring screening questions, always a great thing to do. I highly recommend them and LinkedIn supports those features like these and more or why small businesses rate LinkedIn jobs. Number one, in delivering quality hires versus the leading competitors. So here's your CTA LinkedIn jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to faster. Every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn. Wow, that's a lot of job seekers post your job for free at linkedin.com slash twist terms and conditions apply because they're giving you something for free. Please use the URL so they know we sent you.

Yeah. We can start with Google. I mean, I start by saying I become aware of new ways, it seems like every day. So, we won't even be able to identify all the risks. But I will say that the anti-abortion movement is really acquainted with this strategy as a means, I guess, historically as a means of intimidating and harassing patients and providers. But again, now there's, you know, sort of the stakes are even higher. But I would say, you mentioned Google, let's start there. One of the challenges is that when folks search for abortion on Google, a lot of these search engines, the first thing that will come up are crisis pregnancy centers. And crisis pregnancy centers, for those who don't know, they're also known as limited service pregnancy centers or pregnancy help centers, pregnancy resource centers, are these fake clinics that exist for no purpose other than to dissuade people from accessing abortion and contraception or to delay them from accessing care to a point where they can no longer access care. And the problem is that these crisis pregnancy centers, first of all, they outnumber legitimate reproductive health care facilities by three or four to one across the country. And because they are only masquerading as legitimate reproductive healthcare facilities, they are not covered by HIPAA, because the vast majority of crisis pregnancy centers provide no health services whatsoever. They provide sort of drugstore pregnancy tests and these keepsake ultrasounds, which are basically like a souvenir. But, you know, they look like real reproductive healthcare facilities. Their staff wear white coats. I mean, they're set up like doctor's offices. And the Supreme Court has essentially endorsed this model and said that there's really not much you can do from a policy standpoint to address their deceptive practices. So, setting all of that aside, they are in a position to collect a ton of private health information from folks. So, folks will go on, you know, Google and do a search for abortion services, and the first 10 sites that come up are crisis pregnancy centers. You know, you go on the websites of those crisis pregnancy centers, and now they have your information. You go to those crisis pregnancy centers, and now they have more information. And there have been reports of crisis pregnancy centers sharing that information with Facebook, and and other entities, because of course, all of that can be monetized. They also, of course, use it for movement building purposes, to themselves harass and intimidate, you know, patients and providers. But and then now again, they're perfectly positioned to to support these prosecutions.

But so that so this is something Google could really help is, you know, checking these results, and then making sure that SEO optimization isn't happening in a nefarious way. I just did abortion providers, Texas, Alabama, and a couple of searches. And, you know, it looked from the surface level, I didn't have, you know, all the time in the world to do this. But this is something if there are people at Google who are listening right now, for sure. People at google or any search engine this is something to basically look for is people trying to redirect traffic to these nefarious sites.

And in fairness to Google, Google is definitely aware of the concern and I think is working to address it. But that is one concern is the confusion over the difference between, and it's particularly online, the difference between legitimate reproductive health care facilities and crisis pregnancy centers. Because even as a trained lawyer familiar with the issue, it can sometimes be hard to tell. So, that's one. But then, Molly, you also talked about period tracker apps. So, it's not just period tracker apps, but even... So, period tracker apps are relevant because they too are collecting personal health information. but they're not subject to HIPAA. And it may even be part of their business model to share information, you know, to share some of the information that they're collecting. And some collect more information than others. So, you know, that, those, you know, companies, well-intentioned as they may be, could be subject to subpoenas, which they then, you know, would have to comply with. And then again, that information, you know, could be used to advance these kinds of cases. And then, you know, in the health, women's health innovation space, also reproductive health, you know, companies that are offering medication abortion, even those that are based out of state and are only providing care out of state, they too, while they're protected by, you know, they're subject to HIPAA, even HIPAA allows for the disclosure of personal health information in conjunction with a subpoena. So there's not a lot you can do there. But one thing for those types of companies to be concerned about and really thinking about is cybersecurity. I was just on a call with Bethany Corbin, who's an attorney at at Nixon Guilt, it was just a law firm that represents health startups and sort of the femtech space was talking about this concern. And, and yeah, and so the just the just cyber cybersecurity will be a huge issue, not just for tech companies and tech startups, but also for providers and abortion funds and advocacy organizations. And, you know, basically all those community organizations that are trying to help members of their community access care. So that's a, you know, a huge issue. We talked about employers, you know, who are offering these employee benefits. You know, they too may, you know, unknowingly be creating a tool for cyber attackers to, you know, to use to collect information that could be used to to bring these claims. So they do have to be conscious of, you know, cyber attacks.

So, yeah, if I'm wrong, every time we have a crisis like this, it creates a moment for everybody to review all these attack vectors. And it was nice to see. Yeah, and this can happen on a personal basis, people could, you know, really get educated on which search engines track you using incognito and a VPN and all this kind of stuff. which is a great first step. And then I noticed the period tracker companies saying, Hey, we're going to add end to end encryption, we're going to have anonymous mode flow, I think is the popular one I was reading, said they're going to come up with an anonymous mode, here's the here's the notice, you know, one thing I would add here for the team at flow is, if you're going to add something like anonymous mo mode, what really matters is the default, I would just encourage everybody to just default all of these things defaults matter is something we say in the industry over and over again, just default all this stuff to being private. And the iPhone is obviously exceptional at this, because they'll obscurify your email address for you and everything else. So I'm sure the team at Apple is looking at the app store, I'm sure the team at Google is looking at the app store and saying, Hey, how do we make sure that people can track the use of these apps? some nefarious reasons. And then maybe even putting a higher bar on these apps in terms of approving them, because people do like those interception sites for those routing of women nefariously. it's completely possible somebody could get into the Google Play Store, less likely into the Apple Store, an app that actually tracks you, you think you're tracking your period, and it's actually redirecting you. So just I hate to be cynical and expect the worst. But I think with this contingent of people, that is kind of their plan.

Right. Fortunately, there are some really great legal minds that are thinking about models exactly like that. I don't know that they involve Planned Parenthood, but yeah, that exactly. That's a great point.

A great solution would be also if Planned Parenthood should set up this benefit, And then just tell, you know, Tesla or Uber or JP Morgan, hey, three people chose to elect for this benefit. We funded them for $12,000. You can, you know, keep money in account here at Planned Parenthood for this service, then it would, the person would call Planned Parenthood, Planned Parenthood would verify they're an employee, and then you know, they could, because in all likelihood, maybe going to go to a Planned Parenthood.

So yeah, I think that raises a great point that that it behooves technology companies to really be looking at their privacy policies, making sure that they're very, very clear and prominently, you know, displayed so that users really know what they're you know, accepting and then also how that information, not just how the information will be used, you know, having a really clear data map of the flow of information, I think is really important. I mean, especially because I think most of these companies, you know, their purpose is to advance women's health, not to undermine it. So, yeah.

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So a lot of great questions there. First of all, I want to clarify, there's a difference between plan B, which is the emergence, which is emergency contraception, it's basically a big dose. Yeah, that you take. Yeah. And so, that's theoretically not implicated by these abortion bans. But medication abortion, which is a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol, there are two pills that you take sequentially. That's what folks are referring to when they talk about medication abortion. And it does require a prescription. So, it's not the kind of thing that, in theory, you could have on hand. That said, there are Uh, and and and I think to answer your question about how prevalent medication abortion is it's it's available up to 11 weeks of pregnancy and the guttmacher institute, which is the sort of premier organization that um, you know collects all of this type of data, uh reports, I think that over 50 percent of Abortions now particularly during the pandemic were medication abortions and the vast majority of abortions do take place Early in pregnancy in the first trimester and you can see why medication abortion would be appealing because it's something you can Taking the privacy of your own home um, but uh, so very prevalent, um, and it is I mean, thank goodness It is what distinguishes, you know where we are now from you know where we were in 1973 when roe versus wade was decided Um, there are organizations that you know abroad that prescribe Medication abortion will send it through the mail. Um And and so folks are accessing it that way, you know, especially in states like texas where there are already bans in place um most of the statutes that are the bans that are being passed uh criminalized providers not pregnant people for now um and so what that means is if you do have access to medication abortion uh you should be free from criminal liability um for taking advantage of of that um and that's and we sort of note here too that right now at least lawmakers have said that these medications misfest

And here we go over the weekend just some more data points the period tracking app called stardust became the number one free app in apple's app store partially due to the fact that they offer end to end encryption pretty interesting there as well let me ask a question about plan b the hell. And I'm not, you know, I don't have, I've been trying to educate myself and how many abortions occur, how many of those are plan B, I'm not having been able to get that data. I don't know if you have it. But would one solution here to alleviate pain and suffering and inequality be to make this pill more widely available? And can women have this pill proactively? In other words, can they keep it on hand? you know, men can keep condoms on hand. You know, and other birth control on hand, people can keep things on hand. Are you allowed to have it on hand, as opposed to having to make this mad dash to get it?

So I think for individuals, I think the most immediate thing and you've probably been hearing this everywhere is to support your local abortion funds, which help people who will, which will be helping people on the ground who need to travel across state lines to access care, which can be tremendously expensive. And, you know, for for those who, you know, are, you know, working multiple jobs and have children and, you know, are living in with poverty, it's, you know, can be prohibitively so so those could be a non starter, right? Oh, there are so many getting so many barriers to access to care already and then the idea of having to cross state lines and and travel just it just compounds things tremendously so those kinds of organizations like really truly need support um i think for you know for tech companies i would say you know who maybe you know a big part of your audience um you know obviously we've talked about kind of getting getting their own houses in order and making sure their data is they're collecting as little data as possible and that it's to accomplish the goals they're seeking to accomplish. And then making sure that their data is secure. But then for those companies that have cyber security expertise, you know, offering that support to, you know, abortion funds and QT, BIPOC, or community-based organizations that are going to be helping, you know, folks cross state lines to access care and advocacy organizations like mine. And, you know, just making sure that all of this data remains secure, and even thinking about the development of new technologies that would, you know, help, you know, tools to help people, you know, detect and alert people to these many different risks. At this point, I think it's sort of a full-time job. I mean, Molly held up the book that she was reading on cybersecurity that's, I don't know, like 1,500 pages long, it looked like. There are just so many, so many risks and just helping people to get their arms around that and to know what to do to protect themselves.

Yeah. It was interesting. I was listening to Face the Nation, and Margaret Brennan was interviewing Governor Kristi Noem from South Dakota, and she has a bill to ban telemedicine abortions or what she described as telemedicine abortions. And so the ability to get these drugs, she's trying to explicitly ban it. And so this feels like it's going to be a battleground on state by state and the level of engagement is going to is going to vary quite differently. Listen, Wealthfront is an investment platform that lets you open up low fee IRAs, 401ks and more. here is the amazing innovation they created. They call it self driving money. Basically, it's a robo advisor that builds you a custom investment portfolio of ETFs based on your preferences, your risk score, and your interests. For example, they have a socially responsible portfolio option. So you can put your money to work for the companies that support your worldview. They do all of this a fraction of the cost of a typical advisor. They also have this amazing net worth calculator where you can see your projected net worth over time. All of this takes into account your average deposit size, any major purchases or windfalls like buying a house. It's really an incredible way to manage your money and build your wealth over time. I have a lot of friends and family who use the product. They love it. And it's just made them so especially the young ones financially literate and they understand their future. And here is an incredible call to action. my listeners this week and startups listeners can get their first $5,000 managed for free for life. If they go to wealthfront.com slash twist, I want you to go there right now w e a l t h f r o n t.com slash twist and start building your wealth today at wealthfront.com slash twist. Best thing people can do if they care about this issue. Short term long term Kim is what? Well, if you care about this deeply, what can we do in the short term this week, this year and over time?

You don't have to subscribe to this pod. Go find another one. If you're in that 15% Oh, I don't care. I don't want to hear it. I mean, I really don't. Maybe there's a pro-life podcast you can listen to. The Constitution in theory protects us from the tyranny of religious lawmaking. So it's not my problem. Exactly. Anyway, Kim, thank you so much for coming on. I let the rage out of the box just for a tiny minute. You're welcome.

Um, so that's something that's far off in the future, but I would love to see technology companies people that there are people saying this is like, we're predicting like two or three jumps here. Somebody wants to pursue a case, then they're going to subpoena this information, you know, and for those folks, you know, I would encourage you to look at the fact that Texas, in fact, enacted this law to create vigilantes months before or the year before Roe v. Wade was overturned. Trump explicitly said during the debates in 2016, I tweeted the video this weekend, if you follow me on Twitter, But he was going to stack the deck in order to do this. So if you are giving the benefit of the doubt right now that this isn't going to happen, and this seems you know, like something out of, you know, a Margaret novel, well, here we are, like, you just have to sort of pay attention to what's occurring the last four or five years, there's been an explicit plan in place to do this. So I don't think it's far reaching to think that some states not all, not all prosecutors, but the ones on the extreme are going to subpoena women's data in order to, to prosecute them. And or the people who help them. It's kind of sounds to me like it, it's not going to happen all the time, but it is going to happen. It is a certainty in my mind that there will be deranged people who will chase a woman down and the people who took her in the Uber or, you know, the hotel that put her up that night or whoever helped her, you know, you know, get basic health care. So really appreciate you for doing all this work. Thank you for spending time with us to the audience. If you're part of the you know, whatever 15 20% of the country who feels passionately that there should be a national ban on abortion. You know, I, I don't know what to tell you, like, the majority of the country doesn't want this. I want to respect your religious beliefs. But I think the majority of us would like women to make this decision. So apologies if this is super hard for you to listen to. But this is what the majority of us want. I know I'm gonna get some blowback for even having this on discussion on the pod. So Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you so much. I'm happy, happy to be here.

All right. And we'll have you on again to talk about angel investing. But I was going to make the segue here. And I was like, I just don't want to. Yeah, segue out of this important discussion for that discussion, which is also important, but not as important as this one today. So we'll have you on another time to talk about investing.

Republican controlled Supreme Court has achieved their dark, extreme goal. I was going to announce this next week, but this just happened. We are now the first period tracker to implement end-to-end encryption. Here's what it looks like. We spent the last month racing to build this. What this means is that if we get subpoenaed by the government, we will not be able to hand over any of your period tracking data. It is completely anonymized from your login data. We can't view it. You are the only person that can see this. Data encryption will go live on Tuesday morning with the Android release and iOS update.

Amazing.

Amazing. That should frankly be standard when any health information is on the line. But it's good to know like that that's the kind of that is the kind of innovation that will come out of this. There's always an equal and opposite reaction to everything that happens. The equal and opposite reaction, I hope to this is more privacy.

as healthcare moves online, people get prescriptions online, they do doctor's visits online. This has always been a blocker for providing telemedicine. And then the catalyst for telemedicine obviously became COVID. And so now this is another catalyst. And all it's really doing is raising people's awareness and giving them more options. So you'll have more options to choose from to visit your doctor, you know, online, which is great. But we also have to then keep up and have good hygiene when it comes to, you know, tech audits and making sure that you and only you or the people you choose have access to your data. And a lot of companies that are advertising based, you know, have an incentive to not do this. So if there's advertising and the product is free, you're the customer. Keep that in mind. Yeah. And this is where a paid social network uh is going to be imminent at some point somebody will have a paid feature for your social network without advertising and that could be the game changer here where you're just not collecting it uh or a paid search engine or just a paid it'd be amazing if somebody created a hybrid of you know the google slash facebook stack of like here's your social networking here's your youtube and here's your search engine you know three or four big things you do online, and you pay 15 bucks a month for it, and you don't get track. So if somebody wants to build that startup, DuckDuckGo is supposed to be building but then I read that they're giving data to Microsoft because they use Microsoft Bing search results.

And that was a little overstated. It was a good breakdown about that. It was it was overstated. Like DuckDuckGo is still a privacy first search engine. Yeah.

And you can add to all of this by just turning cookies off, use the Brave browser, use a VPN, and you can get multi-layers of this. And create a fake persona for yourself, which I did, you know, just have a fake persona. I mean, I guess if it gets unveiled, people will find out. I don't like, are you doing that right now? I'm a 15-year-old from Tokyo. I'm a 15-year-old cosplaying girl from Tokyo. Online.

Nobody knows, but... Nobody knows, but it's really fun. All right, let's do some tech news. We have actually been waiting for the right time to talk about this because I think it maybe broke on Friday. It did break on Friday. I brought it up. It broke on Friday. It's super interesting.

This is important. Yeah, this is important as a, you know, I was giving people signs, Molly, of like, you know, we're hitting the bottom. Here we go.

Okay. I know, I can't wait to hear the analysis of that part of it. So Zendesk has agreed to be acquired by an investor group in an all cash transaction valuing it at about $10.2 billion. And desk, of course, is that customer service, customer experience software company, and notably turned down a similar acquisition earlier this year, that would have been a $17 billion acquisition.

Yeah. And so now they're going to get acquired. And what this shows is so just to pause for a second, being a public company, you have this incredible benefit, you can freely trade the shares, your employees can benefit from those freely trading people join your company, they get RSUs, restricted stock units, they get to participate, the public has this great interest, you know, everybody gets to buy your shares. When you're private, only a small group of people get to buy your shares. And you don't change the price, you know, you know, whatever number of days a year 250 days a year. So there seems to be like this incredible benefit to being public, until the public markets values you so poorly, Molly, that a private player says, you know what, I'm gonna take this huge pile of cash I have here, this company is so undervalued, that I'll just take it off the market, clean it up, fix it, optimize it privately, and then put it back on the market. So this always was confusing to me when I was younger. Like, why are these companies going public and private and then public again? And then who are these people taking them private? And what happens is, people are studying the market, they look for an asset that they think is dramatically undervalued, that they can put effort into optimizing and make turn into a money printing machine, and then eventually have another exit. So this is to me, a really good sign of bouncing along the bottom, my prediction has been three to five quarter recession like environment, everybody knows a recession to sequential quarters of negative GDP, we had one who knows what you two is gonna look like, maybe it will be flat. But essentially, we know this is going to be a down market, I predict three to five quarters, which means sometime in the first quarter of next year, in all likelihood, we would start to see things, you know, maybe not spike or surge, but at least feel like we're in a growing economy. Again, as we work out all this stuff, this to me is like an early sign of that. So early signs I've been telling people pay cuts at companies. So we seen the layoffs we've seen hiring freezes, we saw hiring freezes layoffs, then rescinding offers, right. And remember, each one of those feels like a little more gnarly, like, Oh, my God, you just rescinded an offer, the person quit their job, they're coming like, that feels really bad. How about you show up for work in the bus, like, by the way, everybody's getting a 20% pay cut. And if you don't like it, I understand if you want to leave, but I'm now challenging you to go find a better offer in the market. it's really hard for a manager to do that. Like, can you imagine the morale head of you tell everybody they got to take a 20% pay cut when there's 8% inflation, yada, yada. That's going to be the next piece to that'd be the next shoe to drop. And so this is another shoe to drop, which is, you know, I started by Peloton, like maybe this company goes private, or, you know, company gets bought because they have so much cash. Like BuzzFeed is making is I saw BuzzFeed this weekend was like $215 valuation, but they're making three or 400 billion. So when these kind of disconnects happen, where you can't understand the logic, that's a sign of a real bottom. And it doesn't mean you're gonna go back to the previous highs, that's not what's going to happen. But it does mean you could start to grow from this point forward. So this could be a really interesting sign that a SaaS company is going private, taking off the public market. So just mark my word, you may see two or three more of these.

Good analysis.

And their revenue was one, by the way, 2021, $1.3 billion in revenue. So seven times, and I just saw something go across my desk, another seven, eight times for SaaS revenue company, as opposed to 50 or 100, you know, and we're, we're just seeing it in the private markets, you know, 10x is the, you know, the new 50x.

10x is the new 50x is a really good t-shirt. Sorry.

Also of note, So I've noticed Zendesk has a billion five in cash and securities. So even with a billion dollars in cash, you would take nine, the $9 billion market cap down to eight, right? Because you just distribute cash, you have 8 billion, it's getting bought for which maybe even is less than 7.7. 8 billion would be less. Yeah.

So you're saying it's a bottom partly because sorry, not to belabor this, but partly because a company that is has a billion and a half dollars in revenue and a billion dollars in cash is still weak enough to be a big acquisition target?

They don't need to go private. They're seeing that opportunity. They're seeing that choice as more beneficial to shareholders than staying public.

Because of the current conditions and just the fact that the stock price isn't going to go up and

Yeah, they I think they feel like if they were private, they could do things quietly to clean up the business, maybe it's layoffs, maybe it's raising prices, shutting down certain things, selling off certain assets, buying other assets from other companies. There could be some two, three year plan to make this business look even stronger. And when the markets are stronger, come back at again, and then get rewarded. So some group of people are saying, I want to do that work. Because I see an opportunity.

That's where it is. I'm gonna flip this house. I'm gonna buy it. Basically, that's a good one.

Yeah, I'm going to buy this house in Oakland. You know, it just sold for there's a little bit of a downturn.

This is my chance.

Yeah, it's sold for 2 million. I'm going to buy it for one five, clean it up, add 10,000. I'm going to add 1000 square feet, redo the kitchen, and I'm going to flip it in two years. Yeah, I see some opportunity there. Because the public markets are not valuing this.

And

That will be the other one that we will be tracking for the second half of 2022. We got to have Glenn on about from Redfin. And anybody else we've got in our short list of folks in real estate because the real estate market, Adina would be great. From Divvy Homes, we should have a little roundtable on housing because it's going to come apart over the coming six to 12 months. It's usually very slow, Molly, because people can live in their houses. But And Keith, who's coming back on in August. Perfect. We're going to have like a really interesting, that's the last asset bubble to, you know, work its way through. Well, it takes time because you can live in your house. And so, you know, if you were thinking of selling your house and buying a new one, upgrading, downgrading, moving across the country, now you're faced with 6%, 7% mortgage. Yeah. If you qualify, which is your payment is going to be huge compared to what it was last year. If you even qualify and the number of homes on the market is surging and the number of mortgages being originated is plummeting. So when you see that happen, it's like this real flipping. We're like, oh my God, there's so much inventory. Like there was never any inventory. Oh, and you can't get a mortgage. So somebody I know who's selling a house in LA was like, they just told me there's no buyers, but just keep the faith and lowering the price doesn't matter. It's just, there's no buyers. Wow. So, very interesting candidness in the, you know, that I was able to hear about. So, I think it's letting. Yeah. And also I had somebody who was a broker in Austin contact me because we were considering a move there and they're like, hey, you know, now's a great time. There's a lot more inventory. I was like, oh boy, they're so desperate. that they're pinging people who were considering last year during the pandemic moving to Austin, they're pinging them, they're going down their list looking for buyers. And they were even like, or an investment home. I was like, Oh, that's super interesting. You can't move any houses like because from what I understand people I know who moved to Austin, they were like, you know, can offers, you know, things, you know, never even made it to the public listings, pocket listings getting sold. And now they're shaking the trees trying to find buyers overnight. So

That's so interesting because there was a New York Times story over the weekend just about, you know, buyers in Georgia like facing multiple offers and trying to get in right now and the mortgage rates going up and whatever. And it feels like the last time that story is going to be written for the next two to five years, you know. All right.

Thanks, everybody for tuning in. Wanted to let you know that we're going to be doing our 12 week founder university program done by Charlie Huddy, who is amazing. He's on the launch team here and makes great curriculum. We this will be our third cohort. It's a 12 a class. Just it's for people who want to Molly start a company, but maybe they haven't incorporated maybe they have an idea they have a co founder, they don't have a co founder, it's their side hustle. You're kind of just thinking about doing it. So it's not an accelerator where we invest in the companies. like Launch Accelerator, Y Combinator, Techstars and those great programs. This is your kind of thinking about it. Yeah. Once or twice a week, I think they go twice a week now. 12 weeks. And we came up with a really cool way to do this. You pay $700 to go to this course. If you complete all 12 weeks, we don't need the money. You get your money back. because we wanted people to complete the course and go to all 12 weeks. And if you're like sick or something, we're not going to like stick you to it. And so we have 90% of people plus complete the course, which is amazing, which was our goal. And we've invested in a couple of the companies. I think every class we wind up investing in four or five companies. Yeah. So really, it's great program. I hope you go to it was my way of giving back to the community and meeting entrepreneurs earlier in their careers. So

It's fantastic. And live notification, be sure to turn on your notifications. Oh, go to YouTube this week in startups.com slash YouTube, put the notification bell on and then later this week, you will catch among other things like our whole week slate of shows, our chat with investor downtown Josh Brown later this week. Yes. And then of course, all the good behind the scenes that you only get.

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Welcome, everybody. It's Sunday, we like to spend our Sundays with you. And we do two things on Sundays, Molly, we do VC Sunday school, which you as a new VC in the first year of investing, congratulations on your sixth month as a VC, you're doing wonderfully. I give you a plus grades across the board. Thanks, man. commitment level has been amazing. Your focus level, your curiosity, just great across the board. But I expected you would be great at this. I've told you that. And then of course, we'll do our climate interview, which is a really cool company, as we said in the introduction. But what is your question for me this week? Let's get right into it. Molly, the audience is at the edge of their seat, edge of their seat.

Thanks so much for having me on the show. It's just super excited to be here. And yeah, you know, we're part of this overall climate space, sustainability of transportation, looking at what transportation looks like in the next few decades. So really excited to be part of that ecosystem.

Enjoy. Enjoy. Welcome back to this week in climate startups. Billy talheimer is with me the founder of a regent developers of electric sea gliders for regional travel in coastal areas. You may have heard us talk about region as either startup of the week or we live in the future. I can't remember but we highlighted you and then we've had meetings since and I'm so excited to have you on the show because anytime you're talking about electrifying vehicles that are not cars, it's super exciting and new. And then you're talking about electrifying vehicles that also just move around in a totally different new way.

Regent build seagliders. Seagliders are all electric flying boats. They fly on a cushion of air called ground effect. It's the same sort of thing that you see pelicans flying over the water flying on this cushion of air. We do dock to dock over water transportation. We always fly within a wingspan of the water. And so we offer low cost, zero emission, high speed transportation on regional routes, and we're targeting the coastal mobility markets. So think about routes like Boston, New York, LA, San Francisco, the global ferry industry, island hopping in Hawaii. Those are some of the key markets we're targeting.

Yeah, so tell us for people who may have missed that segment the first time around, tell us what what you're building.

Absolutely. It's massive. Our market, our TAM scales with the battery technology. So today we can do 180 miles at end of life of the batteries with existing technology. Regent is an OEM, or sort of like the Boeing of seagliders in this case. And so we sell our seagliders to the operators, to ferry companies, to airlines. And so with existing battery technology, we have about $11 billion market between seaglider sales and aftermarket maintenance. as battery technology grows, we can actually service about 500 mile routes. And so that's more like a $25 billion, Tam, pretty massive market.

And how big a market is that? I mean, ferries, lots of them.

might expect sort of mid decade, mid to late decade, we actually already have a lot of the new battery chemistries, or even alternate energy storage technologies like hydrogen in prototype phase right now. But there's a lot that needs to take place between, you know, your, your cell on a bench, and hey, it works in this specific configuration, this specific environment to we're mass producing these, and we're putting them in vehicles like sea gliders.

How what will it take to get battery technology to that point? Or not building that part of it? But how long do you think that you know,

Yeah. Well, they always tell you, build what you want to use. So we're a Boston-based company, moving to Rhode Island soon, but a lot of New England blood in the company so far. And so growing up for me in the area was Boston and New York. That's the painful route for me. So If you try to drive, you're stuck in traffic, no matter what, you have to go over a few bridges. It's four plus hours. If you want to fly, you spend as much time at the airport as you do actually on the plane. And you can't even take out your laptop to answer an email on the plane because you're going up to altitude and then you come down immediately. There's no high speed rail and boats are too slow. So there's really, there's no mode of transportation where you can do a route like that in less than four hours. Similar in the LA to San Francisco mission and California proposed a high speed rail system and it was going to cost $80 billion. And so there's, you know, it's sort of amazing that we have all this technology. And, you know, we have commercial spaceflight, and we have supersonic jets, and we have eVTOL planes, but we still can't do these regional routes in under four hours. It's sort of the gap between the cars and the trains and the boats that are good for low range and the commercial aviation based in the airport infrastructure network that are good for long range. And so that's really where seagliders enter the mix. It's these these routes between say 100 and 180 miles with existing technology up to 500 miles with this near term battery technology that none of the other modes touch. And it just makes sense across the board. It's basically a high speed rail without the infrastructure cost. It's half the price of an aircraft, it's an order of magnitude faster than a ferry, and it completely eliminates emissions because we have all battery power.

And then, so tell me about the the kind of philosophy here because you're building in some ways a craft that doesn't currently currently exist, at least in the form in which you're building it and and also asking people to travel in a different way. Talk to me about sort of tackling both of those pretty big hurdles.

Is it the new Austin or Miami? It's going to be the center of seaglider production. Rhode Island's a really cool state for us. As we were looking around the country about where to move, we needed a place that had protected waterways for testing of our hydrofoil systems and sort of sheltered environment. We needed access to the ocean. So we could really put our vehicle through its paces, open waters, high speeds, ocean conditions. We needed to be near airports with good connectivity. And then we needed a place to build. And so we actually just had a great deal with the state of Rhode Island, between $15 to $30 million incentive package to move there, 40 acres of coastal real estate. on which to build both our prototyping facilities and production facilities thereafter. It's the center of the maritime industry in the country, all the, you know, the composite racing yachts, the America's Cup yachts are in Rhode Island, there's no sales tax on boats in Rhode Island, and we build boats. So there's a lot of advantages for us to be in Rhode Island.

I have so many more questions, but I have to take a quick diversion because you said you're moving to Rhode Island. Is there something I need to know?

Absolutely. And it's sort of, you know, we're sort of a Boston based team originally. And so it's, you know, it's close enough, like whenever you move a company, the company is about the people at the end of the day. So this was the perfect place where we can build what we need to build with all this, all these extra benefits. And also our company can make the move pretty easily. Yeah, totally.

I mean, honestly, I wasn't sure what the answer was gonna be. But that is so interesting.

COTS, everything off the shelf components everywhere. And that's really, you know, my background is as an aerospace engineer and building EV tools and electric aircraft. And, you know, when we, when myself and my co-founder, Mike started this company, we said, we're going to build a vehicle technology based on existing tech, and we can immediately deploy this into service. So yes, COTS batteries, COTS motors, existing structural composite technology, existing flight controls and sensors. And we have some pretty spectacular stuff there.

Let's go back to that infrastructure question that you mentioned, you know, because in this case, you don't have to build roads. It's not like Hyperloop or pipe where you have to create any tunnels. You just cruise over the existing ocean, but you do have to build this craft. So talk to me about the parts of that that you have created. You're not inventing new battery technology, right? You're using off the shelf to make these craft.

It is gigatons, it sort of depends on how many you assume are going to move over to this mode from what other modes. But I'll actually sort of change it to more of the, I'll answer in a way that's more on the economic side, on the maintenance costs, because for our customers, you know, sustainability is table stakes. And when we think about future technology, it's really like any new mode of transportation needs to be green. table stakes. And then the question is, what's the value prop on top of that? What does this do for my customers? What does this do for me on a unit economic perspective? So for us, with an all electric system, there's not many moving parts. So you think about an aircraft, right? And you think about an aircraft specifically, doing these short regional routes. So an aircraft ages by the flight cycle. Every time you take off and land, you're impacting the landing gear, you're expanding and contracting the fuselage as you pressurize and depressurize, you're heating up and cooling down the engine. All of those things are cyclic fatigue activities and you're aging it and so all your maintenance activities and your cost is associated with takeoff and landing. So as you shorten your route from sort of the long haul routes, 1000 plus miles that these planes are built for, and now you start doing 100, 200 mile trips, basically, your cost basis is the same, but your revenue shrinks because your routes are shorter. So it's not a good economic model. So really, what you want is an unpressurized vehicle that is all electric So there's not as much heating up and cooling down, there's less moving parts. So my maintenance costs drop precipitously. Also, I'm not paying for fuel anymore. Now I'm paying for electricity. And so on a direct operating cost perspective, just counting the maintenance and the fuel costs were 70 to 80% less than any other aircraft in class.

And then how does this so it's all electric, so effectively zero emissions. How does that compare to the way that we I mean, I know the answer to this, but the way that we already travel on by ferry or by plane or by driving? I mean, have you done the sort of gigatons calculation here?

A lot cheaper. When you talk about ticket costs, you have to start wrapping in some of the other aspects of this. So you have to pay for the plane or the sea glider and crew for it and dock space or landing fees at the airport. But even at that basis, our initial product vehicle, it's called Viceroy, it's a 12-passenger vehicle, that beats the competition by about a third. And then our larger vehicle, Monarch, a 100-seater, beats things like regional turboprops and regional jets and even single aisles, like a Boeing 737, actually drops the overall cost by half. So still really compelling cost savings.

So the tickets, when this eventually becomes widespread, will be a lot cheaper, too, it sounds like.

Awesome. Well, yeah, so we'll be flying not right over the water. When you look back at some of the past wing and ground vehicles, or even look back to the 1960s, and some of the first attempts at this with the Soviet chronoplons, they called them, they were skimming right over the water. We'll be flying at altitudes of 10 to 30 feet over the water. Uh, so we still get some aerodynamic efficiencies out of this, but you'll notice that, um, our vehicle seagliders are much more airplane shaped than these past vehicles that have weird sort of reverse triangle wings and short little stubby wings. Um, the reason for that is this, uh, while ground effect is aerodynamically efficient, you're flying on this cushion of air. It's also aerodynamically unstable. In order to fix that problem with past human piloted vehicles, where you actually have a pilot holding the thing off the ground, they basically changed the wing design to give passive aerodynamic stability, the vehicle would sort of regulate itself. In doing so, though, they actually gave up all of the flight efficiencies that you get by flying in ground effect anyways. So you look at those things, and they're just as efficient as an airplane that flies at altitude. And now they have the restriction of they can't even fly at altitude. So it's not a great solution. So what we've done is we say, now we have all this technology available to us, specifically in digital flight controls. So our vehicles are regulated as maritime vessels, because operationally they are, they're dock to dock, they're over water only, they're within a wingspan of the surface. And now we're making it so that so to the captains of these vessels are also maritime masters that get a sea glider endorsement. And so all of the airplane stuff is abstracted away with our digital flight control system, the altitude control, the roll, the pitch, the rejection of gusts, the takeoff and landing. So when Jason's worried about, you know, holding this off the water, that's exactly the difficulty of the past ground effect vehicles. But now we can control it all with a digital flight control system. And there's lots of mature technology that can control unstable vehicles. I mean, there are sea skimming missiles that fly at Mach 3 10 feet off the water. So this is a totally doable problem that's proven. And then it also means that we can have much less training for our crew. So we can add both safety and ease of crew training with this digital flight control system.

Yeah, talk to me more about these benefits of being a boat, a flying boat, because there's a regulatory benefit too, right?

Absolutely. And that was really one of the key unlocks of this sea glider technology of wing and ground technology. The FAA is an incredible organization with an incredible record of safety. They also are severely understaffed to handle the hundreds of new aircraft concepts of electric vertical takeoff airplanes, electric conventional takeoff airplanes that are in line. And as a government body, they need to give time to all of them to work them through the process. You know, it's interesting that everyone's using the same battery technology here, but electric cars are ubiquitous, and there's still not a single commercial human crew that has flown on an electric aircraft. So it sort of speaks to that, you know, certification divide. On the maritime side, while we still have the same bar of safety, and that's really important, we do. Actually, the maritime regulations reference the exact same safety process. We need to generate the same artifacts, do the same homework, improve the same rigor as the aviation authorities. We have more of the bandwidth of the of the Coast Guard of the maritime regulators. Additionally, testing at low altitudes, lower speeds over water is much easier to conduct than coordinating flight tests over land. You know, a lot of the team's background here came from experimental flight tests where you need to coordinate with the airport with the FAA with TSA with, you know, the FCC on your radio frequencies, there's all this coordination and rightfully so it's can be dangerous to fly experimental aircraft, you need to show safety there. But on the water, it's a much simpler process. So case in point, we have a quarter scale prototype, undergoing sea trials right now proving out our float foil fly mode of operations that are particular to the sea glider. This is a 400 pound prototype with 18 foot wingspan. And we were able to work with the Coast Guard to get that approved for test on the order of two weeks. And so we're already seeing, you know, huge expediencies, and we can still run a very safe process, but it's really the engineering and the safety that's running the process, because we have the full bandwidth of the maritime regulator, and we can do so in a more accommodating environment.

So are you saying that the challenges in creating an electric airplane are not technical that like you could potentially create craft that flies in the air or skims over the water. And it would be a roughly equal technology challenge. It's a regulatory challenge to get them moving.

Well, I'll say there's there's actually two challenges, two main challenges that my co founder and I saw before we founded Regent being in the electric aviation space. So yes, on one side, it is that cost and duration of an aviation cert program and that you can prove similar levels of safety by going through other certification channels just by having more bandwidth available to you from the regulator. The other is range. So you take an airplane and you power it with some battery. And again, we want to baseline this on existing technology so we can get these products to market now. You start with a very rosy picture of range, 150, 200 miles. We see some of these companies advertising. But you're going to operate this, you need to make money from it. So you're going to fly this many times a day, get as high utilization as you can, you're going to cycle your battery. And just like the batteries on your cell phone, these batteries age over time. So a battery dies out basically has about 80% of its useful life left after 2000 to 3000 cycles. And if you're flying five to 10 times a day, you're achieving that cycle count in about a year. So if you want to throw out your batteries, replace your batteries, we want sustainable vehicles here. So we can't be throwing out our batteries every week. So if you want your batteries to last at least a year, you need to bookkeep that 80% life left. But then that's not the only thing in airplane and I'm a pilot. So this is really great when I'm in the cockpit. The FAA mandates fuel reserves. If your airport's occupied, you need enough fuel on board to sustain powered flight and divert to another airport. They mandate a half hour by day, 45 minutes by night, or 45 minutes in instrument flight rules, so if you're flying through clouds. And so that's a huge amount because battery technology today gives you on the order of an hour of total endurance. So that's half your battery or more that's relegated to this reserve mission you never use. So we say, what's the hard part of doing this boats versus planes? sea gliders as boats and flying right over the water have this pullover on the side of the road option, right? If the dock is occupied, if there's an issue, we'd land, these are boats, they'll float, we turn off the power system, and now we can use our full battery. And that's actually even more so of a range extension than, than our aerodynamic efficiencies, in total, giving us double the usable range, the mission usable range of an electric aircraft.

All right. This is super cool. And I can imagine hearing our audience being like, yeah, but when am I going to get to go in one?

Absolutely.

When am I going to get to a field trip?

We're working hard here. So we're currently targeting end of 2025 as entry to commercial service. We have customers with firm deposits down, lined up. We actually recently announced Southern Airways Express as the inaugural operator. They operate charger and commuter airlines in Florida and along the East Coast. And they also own the subsidiary Mokulele Airlines in Hawaii. And so it's sort of up to them which market they choose as the operator. But really importantly, in Hawaii, we also just formed a partnership with Pacific Current as an infrastructure provider. So we're not only building the vehicle, but we are thinking about how do we get the docks ready, how do we get the charge down for our batteries as well, so really addressing the whole ecosystem. So end of 2025, entry to service, we have a quarter scale prototype working now. And then the middle step, and where we're going next is actually a full scale, human operated human flown prototype.

And how does the business model work? You said you're an OEM, are you going to and what does that mean in the context of transportation at this level?

So we build seagliders, we sell seagliders, we provide aftermarket maintenance services for seagliders. And we also provide crew training. You know, we'll expect to be converting maritime captains, maybe converting airline pilots, maybe training people from zero to sea glider hero here. So those are our three primary revenue streams are, you know, vehicle sales, maintenance and training.

You better have hats that are like the Top Gun hats that say sea glider hero. I'll send one to you. You're going to need merch. And then you mentioned two craft. And one of them sounded a lot like a plane, the Monarch. So we have two size plan here.

Yeah, we have two sizecraft. Viceroy is our 12 passenger vehicle or 3500 pounds of payload with entry to service by the end of 2025. That's sort of your commuter charter airline replacement, almost long range water taxi, all COTS components. The vision system is called Monarch. We've chosen butterfly names. They're underutilized in aerospace nomenclature, we think. So, Monarch is this vision system, somewhere between 50 and 100 seats, and we're working with some of our early launch partners like Hawaiian Airlines that recently invested in us, also Mesa Airlines recently invested in us. So, we're working with operators like that to say, what's the right size of this vehicle? But sort of baseline pegging this as a 100 seat vehicle, it looks like an airplane. But again, this is this over water only dock to dock wing and ground effect vehicle or sea glider. But this is the vision system because it replaces the bulk of regional traffic globally. So or supplements fleets, at least in the overwater sense. So your regional turboprops, regional jets, small single aisles that are flying these short routes, which is very uneconomical for them to do. That's really where the where the monarch shines.

What is the pitch process like for this? Like, I would imagine that it's a hard sell in some ways, because so much is new, even the mode of transportation. at what point do you see in your conversation, somebody go, but what if this works?

Yeah, it sort of depends on the audience. I think, you know, in general, audience specific messaging is incredibly important for any marketing and sales organization. So we sort of try to identify, we try to understand our customers pain points in whatever vertical they're in. So If they're in the ferry industry, they're often Europe-based. They're getting crushed with carbon taxes. There are new modes of transportation, low-cost air carriers, tunnels and bridges being built that are cutting into their traffic, and they're in danger of getting relegated to just carrying cargo. So, we come to them and we say, what if Rather than, you know, being behind aircraft aviation, you could lead here, you could operate a vehicle with aircraft like performance for the same cost as your existing vessels, and you could crew it with your existing mariners and operate it from your existing docks and your existing routes. And then they say, Oh, you know, we could grow, we could start doing these markets, and we could go further because it's faster to the airline groups. it's, it's the really on the cost perspective, it's, you know, you're using these airplanes that are designed for much longer range flights, and you're sort of making them work in this mission that they don't love. And it's not very economical, and you have these huge maintenance costs. And so what if you could have a vehicle with half the cost and run them on the same routes? What if now you could start feeding your hub airports, and a lot of the larger carriers are based in hubs, what if you could start feeding those hubs from 180-mile radius? Many of the largest coastal cities have coastal airports. There's noise mitigation reasons why you'd want to put an airport on the coast. What if you could just run these sea gliders right up, dock them at the airport and feed everyone into and out of your hub in a much easier way. And so the light starts to go off there. But we've had a lot of success by really trying to learn, understand what's driving the customer, what their pain points are. As an aerospace nerd, I love the fact that we're building this beautiful thing that flies in this cool way and takes advantage of these cool physics. But at the end of the day, from the business perspective, we're developing a widget that solves a customer pain point. or helps grow their market. So we've had a lot of success really focusing on that messaging.

What do you consider to be your competition?

Yeah, I think about how people move regionally right now. So to some extent, they're flying airplanes, and there are, you know, electric aircraft that are in development, to some extent, they're taking boats and their electric boats and our hydrofoil boats. So to some extent, those could eat into market shares, to some extent, we could be as OEMs in the space selling to similar operators. But I actually think more so that this is a space where collaboration will be the name of the game. As we see this proliferation of innovation and new configurations, there's going to be a lot more sort of multimodal connectivity. And, you know, you might connect a Regent Seaglider to Electric Airplane A here, and then it might land over here and connect to some electric ferry. So I think we're going to start to see this proliferation of new ideas, and they're actually very complementary. You know, a seaglider does things an electric aircraft can't do. It's longer range, it's cheaper. Obviously, they can fly over land. You know, an electric ferry can be much bigger, it can potentially take cars. So everyone sort of finds their own niche and will find the markets that work for us.

How much does one of these craft cost?

The 12-seater is $5.2 million and we've been selling the 100-seater for $35 million.

And then how would that, leaving aside, you know, the maintenance costs that you talked about, how does that compare to a ferry or a regional jet?

Ferries are super expensive. Ferries are 50 to 250 million, depending on the size regional. Yeah. Regional jets are interesting too, because there's a big aftermarket for regional jets. So you can, you know, you can pick them up for as low as maybe 10 to 20 and on up through 50, depending on configurations. So it's really sort of market dependent, it's interior dependent to some extent. Even the business model between airlines and ferry companies are different. When we pitch sea gliders, it's much more in the airline business model and a passenger only movement. You're just sort of getting as high utilization as you can. Because ferries are so slow, like where you go to Europe, And by the way, the ferry market is enormous. There's four and a half billion passengers moved a year on ferries. That's as many as in the global airline industry. So it's this massive untapped market of people moving in these really old boats that emit just horrible fuel, like way worse than aircraft. But they're so slow that you're talking like overnight voyages, you're talking six hours on the ferry to do a crossing that they're actually more like a cruise ship model, where they're selling alcohol and selling cool swag on board. And so when we compare to, again, messaging, understanding the customer, when we sell to airlines, the value proposition on economic perspective is based on cost When we sell to a ferry company, it's based on revenue and the fact that we can move more people faster, get higher utilizations and up the revenue.

Right. This is awesome. Is there anything that I should know about Regent that I haven't asked you?

Let's see. We're growing. We continue to look for amazing talent here. We have some big announcements coming up as it pertains to other ecosystem development projects. Again, where we're not just developing the vehicle technology, but we're ensuring that our customers who are putting deposits down are not just ready to buy them, but they're ready to take delivery and operate them. So we have some really exciting announcements coming up in some other big mainland US cities. But things are going well, and we're on pace for 2025.

All right. Keep us posted. Billy Talheimer is the founder of Regent, developers of electric sea gliders for regional travel. I can't wait for my field trip. All right. And I owe you a hat, Molly. sea glider hero. It might be a little like, I don't know, maybe it won't fit on a hat. I'm not sure there's got there's a hat. There's a hat. All right, we'll work on the whole the whole summer catalog here. All right. Love it. Love it. All right. Thanks, everybody for watching and hanging with us on a Sunday. We have another amazing week of content coming up starting tomorrow.

So here's what we're gonna do. Yeah. Skip it. Okay. We're just listen, there is going to be a lot of conversation about this, we're going to have things to say we want to be able to talk about this cogently and calmly and also put together some thoughts on the kind of digital surveillance atmosphere in which this decision is being made. But we talked about it before the show. And we decided we have a great interview recorded, we have a great okay, boomer. And maybe this is just the place where you get to take a break from this.

today. Yes. And we also have a great this week in climate and VC Sunday school coming out Sunday. Yeah, Molly and I will collect our thoughts. We'll talk about all the tech and angles to Roe v. Wade being repealed. And we'll be with you bright and bright and early on Monday ready to discuss this. Today, we've got a great interview with the anonymous account praying for exits. You know, he's on Instagram and Twitter. And he, you know, takes it to the tech industry. But in a very insightful manner, we discuss everything going on in markets, roadstocks, crypto startup valuations, and how they've reset post crash, and maybe some of the behavior of new venture funds, and a lack of discipline and what the next year is going to look like for both sides of the tables, investors and for founders. And we even talk a little bit about what was behind the old all in podcast controversy.

It's going to be a great episode. We also, as usual, have OK Boomer on Friday. We're just doing you know what we're doing this week in startups.

Just what we're doing today. Yeah, that's it. So stick with us. It's going to be a great episode. And Sunday is going to be awesome. Yes. Stick with.

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All right, everybody. Next up is one of the my favorite people on the show that I've never met. We've had two anonymous guests in the history of this podcast. One of them was Biffin next an anonymous crypto account with, you know, an axe to grind against Heather and the fact that they won't release information about their holdings. We thought that would be pretty good public service to do that. Of course, with the disclaimers that who knows what the agenda is, we don't know. And the other one was praying for exits, which is a satirical Instagram account. that, let's face it, you know, it takes the piss out of the technology industry, but in a very, I think, intelligent fashion. So this is the second time I'm having praying for exits on the pod. Mr. exits. Are you there?

I am great to see you. And what a difference a couple months makes.

Yeah, I mean, we talked in December, and we were talking about it being the peak of the market. And sure enough, here we are six months later, and it is hopefully the trial, hopefully, one peak to trial here. Let's start with that. In terms of the carnage. In your career, I know that you are, in all likelihood a millennial, you're not like a boomer, that's for sure. So this is your first major pullback you've seen, or perhaps your second, if you were around for 2008.

Yeah, I think I was tangentially around for 2008. I didn't have a huge amount of money on the line. But this time time around, it definitely is a lot more acute feeling for sure.

How does it feel to see something blow up this dramatically, you know, for the first time up close and personal while you're actually working in the field? Do you feel like you're like, landing at the beach, like in that Saving Private Ryan meme video that they always make with everybody getting, you know, just absolutely annihilated, landing on the beach?

Yeah, I think, and this is something that we talked about last time I was on, it felt like we were actually at peak exuberance in December. There were a lot of points that you and I both made where we couldn't necessarily really understand what was happening in the market at the time. While I do find it somewhat shocking at how violent maybe the pullback has been and how persistent it's been, I think we've had maybe 10 green days and I don't know, a couple of months at this point. So I think that that was very, very It was new for sure. I'm sure for most people who have been in the industry in the last 10 years, that was also a very new feeling. But I can't say I was necessarily surprised. You see all of the different kinds of speculation that was going on in the markets at the time. There was only really one way it could end, especially with all the money that had been pumped into the system. I think we're just seeing a very natural pullback. We might have gone a little bit too far, but I do think it was necessitated by A lot of the things that we were seeing that people who have been in the industry for a while may not have been agreeing with.

Yeah, and I think the the way you framed it is exactly correct. We knew that there was a lack of discipline to say the least in the market, we knew there was a sense of entitlement brewing on all sides of the table, you know, the the founders, the investors, perhaps even LPS, this incredible sense that like, hey, if you place a bet, it goes up. And that's just how it works. And in fact, Dave Portnoy kind of made a joke meme about it, that, you know, buying stocks when he was doing day trader Davey, whatever he was doing was stocks go up. That's just the nature of stocks. Well, now here we are a violent crash. It has been 80 90% retreat and obviously private market companies, they behave a little differently because they're not measured every day in stock price. When we look back, at this moment in time, and let's just say the peak market 2021. What stands out to you as the peak moments and the most confusing that now do not seem as confusing as they maybe did that year?

Sure. One thing we actually touched on the last time we spoke was the place that founders felt like that they were in, which was they had 100% of the power. They were the gatekeepers into their own rounds. Just because nobody had experienced anything like this before, I think you saw an extremely high level of confidence and self-reverence that was present in the founder side of things that I think has been quite humbled. I think that the playing field on who's providing more value in the situation has leveled out a little bit more because obviously when things were good a year or two ago, everybody had money, everybody had a fund, everybody had $50 million to splash around. Now, that has constricted quite a lot. I'm sure you being a capital allocator yourself, you're very aware of what the LP markets look like. So I think that if you're investing and you have dry powder and you have a point of view that you can invest into right now, I think you have far more power than founders do in a lot of cases. So it's really interesting to see how quickly that switched up.

Yes, the dynamic built up over the last 13 years of bull market 2008 to 2021. That 13 year bull market, all of the power in negotiation just went to one side of the table founders who could raise money and say, if you want to invest in this company, you can't do diligence. And I had many times this was the to me, this was the one that was the screaming red flag. when people said, Hey, you're putting in 500k, you're putting in a million, you're the fifth largest check in this round, you're doing more diligence than the four people ahead of you. And you know, one of them is putting in five, and the other ones are putting in three. And nobody has asked for customer references, nobody has asked to see our bank statements, right. And you know, we have like a standard diligence list, we would ask people for Mr. exits. And some people got I dare I say upset at me for wanting to do diligence. And I said, Well, you know, there's there's LPs, we deploy their money, they just, at some point, you know, things might not work out for an investment. And somebody might say, like, what did you do in terms of diligence? This is an edge case, but you might want to be able to open a diligence folder in a, you know, a document where you said, Hey, here's what we check. This is what we knew. You know, if you were a Theranos investor, you know, you might go back and look at your diligence say, Hey, where do we go wrong? And that to me was just a screaming red flag, of course, cryptocurrency. And startups that had yet to launch their product raising at valuations that were larger than companies that had actual revenue and launch products. That to me was the other screaming red flag thoughts on those two.

Yeah, I think, first of all, there were multiple deals that I had to pass on last year because I was told that if I wasn't going to be a lead or co-lead, I wasn't entitled to the data room. So that is, yeah. Wow. So that is, to your point, even if you're writing a million, $5 million check, if it's a $40 million round and you're not putting in the most of the money, people were very tentative to share data rooms. And I think that that's a function of the other side of the coin that you just brought up there, which is a lot of people If you actually looked at their data rooms, there wouldn't be a lot in there because they haven't really accomplished much. They would be thin. They'd be super thin. And I think that they would actually, in a lot of instances, if you had to have a structured data room put together for a lot of these companies, it would in fact work in the opposite way that it was intended to, in the sense that you would kind of see the emperor without any clothes. And so I think that in a lot of instances, not only was it because people felt like there was some benefit to being extremely secretive. But I also think that it was because a lot of these companies were raising on promises that aren't necessarily visible through traditional financial diligence means. And so, when you're betting on kind of like the exuberance of the market and the promises of things to come in the future, it honestly doesn't even make sense to have a data room because what would even be in there?

Exactly. I mean, there could be a couple of checkmarks, like you've actually incorporated, you have an employee stock option plan, you have IP assignments, these are the things in a, you know, pre launch company that you just want to make sure are in place, right? But you're correct. There's no chart in there. There's no you know, projections in there necessarily the if there were projections, those are future. So you're just making sure you're like actually investing in a company that in that case, just has like their IP assignments and basic legal x's and o's done properly. But this is like really indicative of a hot market when when a founder can turn away money, because they want to look in there. But to your point, what are you gonna see in there? And that to me was the red flag in crypto. Of course, I had many people on my team, my investment team did 57 introductory calls last week, that doesn't count second calls or third call. So just introductory calls 57 in a week, Mr. exits. And so we meet with every we'll meet with anybody, right? We really want to meet a lot of people and kind of put plant a flag, like, hey, we met them, and we'll check in with them later. It was just amazing to me over the last couple of years, the evaluations of crypto companies that didn't have products in market 50, 100, $250 million. And like you're saying, there's, there's no if you were to open the data room that would show no customers by some estimates over 90% of startups will go out of business in year one. That's why Microsoft created the Microsoft for startups founders hub. This program provides founders at any stage with up to six figures in resources. Wait until you hear about this ridiculous list of perks, you're going to get up to $150,000 in Azure credits based on your stage and size, you can get free access to get hubs enterprise tier, technical advice from experts at Azure and Microsoft Cloud, one-to-one mentorship from their mentor network, exclusive benefits and discounts from companies like OpenAI, huh? Very nice. And the best part is there are no fundraising requirements. So unlike others in the industry, the Microsoft for Startup Founders Hub doesn't require startups to be investor-backed or third-party validated to sign up and access benefits. It's truly open to any founder, like it should be. And it's not about who you know, it's about what you're building. So any founder at any stage can get up to six figures of value by signing up at aka.ms slash this week in startups, take a minute to write this down. aka.ms slash this week in startups, no spaces, no dashes, make sure you use that URL so they know you're a fan of the show.

Do you find that to be the fault of the venture capitalists? Or do you find that to be the fault of the founders that paradigm they just described?

Yeah. So I think, in some cases, there were neophyte investors who did not want to upset a founder. Okay, so there could be multiple dynamics going on here. But just working this out, there were VCs who maybe were recently founders, or they just have no experience and probably no mentoring, because they started their own fund. You know, they started their own $10 million fund, they rolled their own on angel list, whatever, which is totally fine in my mind. But you understand that they may be nobody, there was no Bill Gurley or no rule off or no Michael Moritz saying, Hey, here's how we evaluate companies that Sequoia at benchmark. So with no mentorship, or light mentorship, they mightn't, they might just say, you know what, I don't want to, I don't want to upset the founder, I'll lose the deal if I ask for information, etc. So yes, they would have perversely been enabling their own demise. Because they just didn't feel comfortable, and they wanted to be popular. I sometimes will be unpopular with a founder in the short term. you I can give you one anecdote, I had a founder, who, we had an agreement that we were investing this amount of money, we had over a 10% position in the company. And that came with a board seat. And they demanded we give up our board seat in this bridge round that was coming up, because this new investor was going to put more money in a higher valuation, all this stuff. And I said, Listen, you know, we have an agreement. So what, you know, we're inclined to go just go with the agreement for now, if we own under 10% shortly, maybe it makes sense for us to give up the word seat to somebody else. So maybe we go forward with that. And that seemed like a reasonable way to handle it. They got very upset at me that I was not being founder friendly that I was like, this is not the Jason Callahan. So I said, Well, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We gave you, you know, millions of dollars. We have an obligation to our LPs as well. It's unfair for you to say we should now having give you all that money have no insight into the business and not be stewards of the business when we own such a large percentage. We were the third largest owner in the business after your two founders. Sure enough, company had all kinds of issues, investigation because of financial irregularities and problems, and the co founder quit. So you know, it in fact blew up the founder a year later, two years later, came to me and said, You know what, you explain to me why you need to have the seat. you then were correct things got off track. And then you wound up being my biggest supporter when we cleaned up all that mess. I really appreciate you Jake out. So it was like a little bit of an arc. And sometimes in the short term, the job is to not be popular. It's to be candid and honest and to be a you know, a real part a true partner, which is tell people if like, things are dumb. You know, I'm saying

hundred percent. I think that your point resonates with me that I feel like venture, especially in the last year or two, was turned into a little bit of a high school lunchroom in the sense that you had a bunch of new kids, new freshmen in the at the school and they were trying to figure out what their place was. Like anybody who's trying to figure out their place in a much bigger community, you saw a certain level of assimilation. I think that was towards more negative things like not doing diligence, rushing into deals, co-investing just off the base of who you were co-investing with and not anything else. I think a lot of people felt a certain level of imposter syndrome maybe over the last year or two, and to combat that, the only thing that they could really do to validate their newfound position in this ecosystem is to be like, oh, yeah, well, I invested alongside the best crypto funds in the world. We've done deals with Andreessen. We've done deals with Sequoia. But if you were to ask what the thematics behind all that was, there's no real there's nothing really there. And so I think that what you've seen is a bunch of people assimilating into these negative habits that were kind of propagated by all of this money that was poured into our ecosystem recently. And that has just become a death spiral for a lot of people. And I think you're going to see a lot of these funds, these 10, 15, $20 million funds that were given to a first-time manager who has some tangential relation to technology far, far away. I think that you're going to see a lot of those turn into zombie funds. Yep. One in dozen. Yeah. Yep. Totally.

it's a really astute observation, especially for somebody of your age and generation. Like I think for some reason, you took this job more seriously than maybe some other folks. And, you know, if you watch any of the shows, we were we crashed about we were the Theranos one, but these were amazing shows. I as super pumped, I couldn't get into it, but it was it didn't click for me, I'll say. for whatever reason. But there's always some people in these stories who are around the table, we say, you know what our unit economics or this is an issue, whatever. And they basically get run over. And they're the person at the party who's like, you know what, like, maybe we shouldn't light that couch on fire in the house, or, you know, like, somebody who's pumping the brakes and just trying to keep things safe. kind of becomes the killjoy, right. And I think a lot of people want it to be popular. And they and they they substituted, like you're saying in high school being popular. know, but then they were conformist. And then they developed really, really bad habits. And now we're to see the opposite. Now is the age of the builder. Now is the age of real businesses, product market fit. And I have committed now to doing twice as many investments. I'm working twice as hard now, as I said, we did 57 first round meetings, and I'm trying to get that number to 70 meet 70 new companies a week. get them in our database, and then start tracking them and see where in their lifecycle they are. So we can make these investments. I had a company that was, you know, I don't wanna say demanding, but was demanding, you know, let's just pick a number 30 $40 million valuation. And they came back and I kid you not like closing around in the you know, $10 million range. And this is in a matter of weeks. So the market has shifted dramatically. If you're in the startup game, you've definitely heard of intercom before. And you've used it because you know, when you're at a website, and the little chat bubble pops up, that's intercom, you know it, you use it, you love it. intercoms platform can help you engage and support your users through personalized chat like experiences. And these are so powerful. We've all used them. Over 25,000 companies are doing these kind of interactions every day. When you provide great customer service, that means less customer churn, less customers churn, you know what happens your LTV goes up lifetime value, your company becomes profitable, you get a bunch of investors, you IPO, your team makes a bunch of money. That's it's basically what happens and it all starts with intercom. So if you're an early stage high growth startup, you can get access to intercoms early stage Academy today at a 95% discount. Join the program today at intercom.com slash early dash stage. Or you can just email them startups at intercom.io. Tell them you want to try the software and that you heard about it on this week and startups. And on July 20. intercom is hosting another hybrid event in its CX for growth series. This event is called localize your customer support experience and will feature experts from intercom link tree and localized talking about when and how to prioritize customer support in other languages and regions. It's a great topic. What are you seeing in terms of earlier stage valuations, people were investing 25 to 50 million pre product market fit, they were investing 50 to 100 million at a 200 times revenue. So 500k in revenue could equal $100 million company. What are you seeing now?

What do you see now, Mr. I'm seeing that I'm seeing those multiples compress quite a lot. I'm seeing you know, say you have 500k in revenue, I'm seeing maybe like 20 to 25x. If you're a good founder, maybe a little bit higher than that, or like a multiple time founder, or, you know, you're doing something of note in your career, then that goes a little bit higher.

Get a little extra credit for your track record. So you're saying just to reflect back to you, 20 times revenue. So 500 K 20 times revenue is 10 million, um, 30 times revenue, 15 million.

So something in that range. Yeah. And then if you're, if you're a multiple time founder and you have, you could probably maybe squeeze out 20 to 25, but I like all last year I was seeing pre-product seed rounds, 50 mil all day long.

free. Now explain what that means to somebody who's not in the business, you're seeing a $50 million valuation on a business that's accomplished what Mr. exits, it is accomplished a deck and like a pitch deck.

Correct.

Okay. So they have the pitch deck. What else do they have?

They have a pitch deck. Maybe in the case of crypto companies, they have a white paper. They have assembled some semblance of a team together of, let's call it three to five people who are going to create the foundation of the company. Then it's a whole lot of promises as to, these are the types of people that we're going to hire. This is how we're going to implement the product. This is the types of people we even need to hire to build the product.

they have a strategy, they've got a plan, they've got a pitch deck to sell you on that plan. And they have maybe two or three people who are now working on this full time or maybe contingent on closing the revenue.

For sure. They've also drummed up some level of interest from specific... They'll say, oh, we have a few angel investors, and these angel investors have a tangential relation to this specific industry that we're tackling.

They got an advisor. They got a Jason Calacanis. They got Naval. They got Kevin Rose. They got somebody with some Tim Ferriss, whatever. Those were the original ones you tried to get in your passport. I don't know who the new ones are, but it might be... I don't know who the new pass I call these the passport stamps in our business used to be Y Combinator Naval me Kevin Rose, Tim Ferriss, Gil Pinchina, you get one of those a Ron Conway would be the best one, you get Ron Conway on your, you know, cap table. Okay, now everybody else can feel safe. As you said, people were using, you know, affiliation as a proxy, like, you know, this bizarre term social proof to get other people to put their money down. But if you think about that, $50 million in value is supposedly created for a 20 slide pitch deck and three people saying they're in. I mean, it's like you're getting $2 million per slide of the deck.

That's how history will look at this. Is that you got $2 million for each slide in the deck. Basically. The other side of it is that history will look at it as the people who enabled this kind of behavior really couldn't do basic math because the chances that that company has a meaningful creation of value from 50 mil to whatever, you're destroying the dynamics of your own fund if you do that enough times because you don't really get to leverage the power law in a very good way. This is really important to unpack.

power law says that the majority of your returns are going to come from the minority of your investments. So if you do 30 investments in a fund, your your 95% of your returns will be the top two. And that supposes that they are returning 50 to 100 times your money.

Sure. So how many 100 x's are you going to get on a $50 million company that just has a pitch deck?

Well, if you were diluted 50%, right, you could actually do the math. If it was a $50 million, if it's $50 million, you own 10% of it, you put 5 million in. So you own 10% of it. Over time, you'll be diluted, you'll instead of own 10%, you probably wind up owning five on an exit, five on an exit for you to break even becomes a billion dollar exit. And to 10x to 20x, you would have to be a $20 billion company, right? So you're You're really, it's not going to happen unless you hit Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and time perfectly your sale. It's just not going to happen.

For sure. But all of those companies by the time they had reached a $50 million valuation were far more accomplished than anything that we see comparable in the market. I just think that there's, nobody really taught all of these new fund managers how fund return dynamics actually work. Such a disaster. Yeah, it's just very, very interesting. And I think that that's one of the things that I've really maybe touched upon a lot of my content is that we really enabled a lot of people who didn't know what the f*** they were doing with a lot of money for whatever reason. And I don't know if it was exuberance or ignorance or just trying to be cool. But I do think that, you know, the world as a whole is paying for it in one way or another. If you look at, you know, the NASDAQ or anything else.

We literally just talked about it on an all in which we taped right the new episode 84 of all in the comeback episode. We taped right before I came on air with you and you look at the three big asset bubbles. stocks, you know, three big asset bubbles, you know, for, you know, this cycle, you know, growth stocks down, whatever 70 80 90% got crypto down similar. And then the last one, I think that's going to really show some, some gnarly scars is going to be real estate. And it always is kind of hard with real estate, because people can live in their homes, because they have some intrinsic value. But you know, for me, this is when I did my best work the last time around 2008 to 2012 is when I hit all my big hits. And if you were if you were investing and placing bets during that period of time, you are going to win. I don't put any of this success or mine or novels or Gilpin Sheena, anybody who did well in that period, it was a function of being in the right town. It was like being in, you know, New York in the late 70s into 80s. And you're a musician, like, punk was happening, new wave was happening, hip hop was gonna happen, like, you were just as a musician in the right place. And this has happened, you know, for poetry in San Francisco during the beatnik era, whatever, you know, television in, you know, being in LA, during the, you know, 50s into the 60s, you know, like, if you were a television, if you were a writer, and you could get on a television show, you were going to be successful, because it was such a giant wave. And I think the waves gone and now I think a lot of tourists are going to be gone, which will be great for the rest of us who want to do real work. What founders what VCs are going to succeed in the coming years in your mind? And how are you strategizing your own career?