My First Million - #69 - Paid News, Burning Money & Solving Climate Change

Episode Date: April 25, 2020

Today's ep is possible because of Superside! Head to superside.com to hire a dedicated team of designers! Sam (@thesamparr) and Shaan (@shaanvp) are back to talk about Burning money (0:36), Asia monetizing podcasts way better / paid news (3:23), Drudge report getting 1.1 billion visits a month?! (11:28), Neil Patel and where most enterprise revenue coming from maintenance (20:59), Book a YC team (29:17), Remote.com raising $11M seed (33:19), Attrition projection/modelling (37:52) and Yishan Wong solving climate change (41:08).  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This episode is brought to you by Superside.com. So Superside.com, if you need something designed quickly, go to superside.com. Give them a try. Humble and smart man can admit when he's changed and is wrong. So I am humble and smart. What up, Sam? How are you doing? Hi. You got a sweatshirt on that says it's only money.

What are you trying to say? I'm trying to say that when I look at my portfolio and look at my life. losses. It's only money. It's only money. You know, I met this guy once and he was like, he, I don't know, doesn't matter. I met a guy and we were talking and I'm easily excitable. So if you start talking to me and you start talking a little bit of sense, I get really excited and I will triple down and make some kind of commitment that I don't want to make. But I did that with this guy where we were both talking about money and we were like, you know what? Fuck money, right. Like we need to fuck money. And we agreed to do a money burn.

in San Francisco, we were like, okay, a thousand dollars, you bring a thousand dollars, and we're just going to burn it. God, that's so stupid. And of course, exactly. Does money burn? Yeah, it's paper, right? It's not paper. It's cotton. What?

Yeah. So it's like a riddle. What weighs more? All the money printed in a year or all the trains that have ever passed through Grand Central Station. And the answer is they weigh the same, which is the first. both waitless because trains don't pass through Grand Central Station and money isn't made from paper. Ah, okay, good.

I love riddles. Thank you for that. So in fact, it does grow on trees. But I'm pretty sure money burns. I think I've seen this in movies, unless they're using fake paper there. But anyways, we didn't end up doing it because I pushed out because I was like, do I really want to burn $1,000? I don't think I do.

And also, I was like, this is going to get so much blowback. And no one's going to care about the intentions behind it. It's just going to come up. Cross is a dushy thing to do so I didn't do it so I'm sorry to my friend I backed out of it but I do like the idea of sort of letting go of the attachment to money but um anyhow yeah it's only money it's only money and I paid $50 for this hoodie $80 or something I bought it because uh Dave Portnoy have you seen what he's done uh what I mean which part of the founder of uh the barstool founder of barstool is trading he

put three or four million dollars into an account and has been day trading and filming the whole thing. I think he's down 600K right now. And it's awesome. It's so good. It's really exciting to watch and he wore one of these, so I bought it. Nice. His plan is going according to plan, I think. I love it. He's losing a lot of money. You want to get into this? Yeah, let's do it. Okay, I think I have two or three interesting things. Have you read what I wrote? I'm looking at it right now. So are we talking, okay, we talk about three things on this podcast, right? Ideas, so like kind of, you know, interesting ideas based off of trans observations, et cetera. We talk about people that are doing interesting things or living interesting lives. And then the last

one is that we talk about, you know, there's cool stuff we saw or stuff we're trying ourselves. And so which one, this first one, which one is this? One, I have, I have number one and I have number two. So the, there's two of them. The first is, let's do, let's do. the Japanese one. Okay, so one of my favorite things to do, and it's kind of a nerdy thing, is I love looking at, and I've told you this,

I love looking at what other countries do and figuring out why it's interesting and why we don't have it in America or the other way around. Okay. And the Japanese and Chinese cultures, which I know close to nothing about, I don't entirely understand

if they have anything in common. Like, I don't know if, like, the similarities between Japan and China is the same as America to China, so I don't know. But when I've noticed that both the Chinese and the Japanese are wonderful at monetizing news apps. And there's a few reasons. The first reason is in Japan, I don't know if this is true in China, but in Japan, it's still quite common to buy newspapers and to subscribe to news. That's still common.

In China, I don't know why it's so much popular, but for example, in China, the, you know, people who have podcasts like this, they monetize significantly better with subscriptions. So like there's like for example, Serial was one of the most popular podcasts whenever it came out. It had I think 56 million listens or something crazy like that. And it only made like a million dollars in ad revenue. It was shit. Whereas multiple creators in China will make five,

10 million dollars a year and with a significantly smaller audience. So anyway, I got really interested in these, businesses and the the one that i think is most interesting is called user base have i ever told you about use a base nope okay so the only way you would likely know about them is because they bought courts in 2018 for about a hundred million dollars so the interesting thing about user base is their public in china so i could i went and found a lot of the reports which i loved doing and i looked at their decks and i also learned all about them so japan right not sorry japan user base is Japanese. Long story short, user base is before the Corona thing happened, they were publicly traded

at $826 million market cap. And they only raised $5 million to start, and they're about 10 years old. So they raised a significantly, a very small amount of money for how big they got. And the way that they make money is they own a handful of products, but three of them make the most money. The first is quartz. That actually doesn't make a significant amount of money, and that was a stupid company to buy. I don't think they ever should have done it. The second thing is Speeda, which for my understanding, it's all in Japanese when I go to the website, but from my understanding, it's kind of like crunch base. And then the next one is news picks. Now here's where I'm being long-winded, but have you heard of news picks? Tell me why I care about this. Tell me about these apps. I will. Have you heard of

news picks? I have not heard of it. Okay, they only have 150,000 subscribers, but they do something like $50 million in revenue. And here's where the opportunities are. is you know pocket and you know flipboard yep they have something like 50 million dollars or 50 million users they don't make shit they lose money they don't make shit and so what i want to ask to you is why how do you think you would monetize flipboard and pocket and these things better because we like now's the golden opportunity for new stuff and i guess i'm just excited because i'm a news junkie but these companies are significantly better they make something like a hundred dollars per user in revenue versus pocket, which is probably like 50 cents.

Right. You know, I think one way to think about this is who is successfully replicating that model here, right? So you have The Athletic, which has built a pretty large revenue business off of subscriptions. And then I think one of the legacy, I don't know, New York Times, whoever is doing really well, right? Isn't that the case that New York Times or Wall Street Journal? One of them is like doing well? These aren't the same. These aren't the same because user base isn't a publisher.

It's an aggregator. Sure. Which is a wonderful company. More like Flipboard. Yeah, which is wonderful because you don't need a significant amount of people, and the market size is like everyone in the country. Yeah. So I'm not sure why people would pay for that.

I don't know what the cultural difference is. I've heard the same things about podcasting as you have, which is that the podcasting industry in China is worth multiple billions, whereas, you know, in the U.S., it's, you know, hundreds of millions type of thing. And so I'm not sure what the cultural differences are. In fact, some of these things are pretty nuanced. So, for example, live streaming, the same thing happened where in China, live streaming is like so crazy huge.

So I'm at Twitch now. Twitch is a big network, but we're just in gaming and, you know, average American doesn't use Twitch. But in China, the live streaming apps are on par in popularity with like a Twitter, an Instagram, a Facebook. It's like part of the mainstream culture. And people wondered why. My theory on why, for live streaming at least, was that in China, a lot of,

there's sort of a sort of suppressed, I don't know, or something like that, where porn sites are often blocked or firewalled out. And there's just a crazy ratio of men to women where there's way more men than there are women because of the sort of one child policy, I believe, that was in effect for many years. And so people valued boys. And so they had more boys. And so I think the reason live streaming is super popular in China and not in the same way in the U.S. is because of those cultural factors. So people will watch live streams because it's sort of like this weird flirting soft-core porn thing where you're watching a cute girl from a distance and you're able to chat with her and send her tips and virtual gifts.

And so a lot of people in the U.S. just look to China and they're like, how do we just, oh, it's happening in China. It's going to happen here. But they missed that the underlying reason it worked in China and why there was demand for it in China, where there's less demand for it here. So that's what happened in live streaming. I wonder if the same thing is happening in podcasting where why is it so much more popular there than it is here.

and then the same thing maybe in the news apps. What is it culturally, and I don't know, what is it culturally that makes people either value this more or pay for this more? Like, for example, in India, we've talked about Indian education apps and how valuable they are. So an app like BGU or there's a bunch of different Indian apps that are very big subscription businesses for education, you know, multi-billion dollar companies.

And you don't really have the equivalent here in the U.S. I know you don't. And I think all the creators out there, I think they can do this. And can I explain to you how I would do this? Okay. And this is interesting because this involves news, but involves all types of paid information. I think paid information should be significantly larger than it is.

And I think it's going to get more popular, actually. I think that anyone who's doing paid stuff that is normally free, it's going to be much larger. And so here's why I think, here's how I would do it. If I was starting from scratch, which I kind of am. I am in this business is the first thing is, you, be surprised that shit that's free or is mostly free, if you package it slightly differently, people will pay for it and they will like it more. And so what I've seen with our NPS for trends versus the hustle, which is free, the trends MPS is significantly higher. It's like

fucking 90, which is crazy high. And I believe that the content is great, but also people enjoy it more because they pay for it. So I think people, builders out there need to think to themselves, man, there's this weird mind fuck that I can just literally charge for something. It normally is free and people will like it more. The second thing is I think people need to charge up front, no freemium. I think if you charge up front and don't do any freemium, you're going to get significantly better results. The third thing is things that a lot of times companies like doing this low density

with a lot of white space on their pages. Nope. Fill it with information. Get rid of that beautiful stuff. That's not right. Have you been to drudge report.com? No. You don't know what drudge is?

I've heard of it, but I've never gone. Okay, so it's like, political? Yeah, it's, it's a name Matt Drudge. I could be saying it wrong. Drudge is a hard word to say. It's just like one guy and he's just like pretty right-winged guy. And I went to the website just now and I was like, oh, I must have typed it in wrong because the website looks like, you know.

Oh, it's Craig's. Disless garbage. Dude, that website gets a billion views a month. That's crazy. Is this conspiracies? Is that what this is? I would say it depends if you ask. I don't think it's conspiracy, but it is for sure biased and right-winged.

Just like, like the founder of Huff Poe. This literally gets a billion. Are you joking? Or this literally gets a- I swear to God. Like literally one billion. It could have declined recently. Dude, fucking, do you know Drudge was?

the one who broke the story about the Clinton when he slept with Monica Lewinsky. He called it. So anyway, it's really just an aggregator of other links and every once in a while he'll do something original. And does he retitle the headlines or Yeah, dude, it's literally just a page that you

click off. And every once in a while he does stuff. Yes, that page was designed in 1996 and it's never changed. If you haven't gone to this, go to it right now, drudgerport.com. This is so weird. doesn't even like literally there's like or or if you go to drudge.com I think there's like 20 links that are it's a black and white page 20 black links and then there's just a giant picture of an astronaut because it's like related to one story with a huge

headline and then there's again 1,000 links below that according yeah I a report was done in like 90 in like two okay so according to similar web it gets close to 100 million unique visitors so 10 page views a month yeah probably a billion it's very influential this site. And it's interesting. And I think that if you just like paywalled this, he would crush it. So who's this guy, Matt Drudge? What's his story? He's a former journalist. He, um, he's just a guy. I don't know. He's just a guy who created a cult following and people love it. And when Ken Lear started Huff Poe, he said, I'm going to make the left wing version of, of Drudge Report. And so if you go to this website, it does a really good job of big, bold headlines. That's like yellow journalism.

by Hearst in the... What does that mean? Yellow journalism. Basically, this has been around forever. People think clickbait is new. It ain't. Hurst was a pioneer of this, so he would have these huge headlines, and it would always...

It was mostly about, like, blood and scandal, and, you know, if it bleeds, it leads, type of thing. And then Rupert Murdoch also did it with his newspapers, and that's how they got popular. So if you go to Huffpo.com, it's very similar to this. a huge headline right in your face. And what that does is in your brain is it triggers a little bit of addictiveness.

Business Insiders just like this too. If you go to Business Insiders, big ass headlines. So they put their stats on the site. It says visits to drudge today, 34 million in the past 24 hours, 1.1 billion in the past month, 10 billion in the past year. Dude, I'm telling you, it's fucking crazy. This is like, what is happening? This website is like the Craigslist of news.

Like it's a tiny ass staff. It literally could be five people. And it could make $50 million a year. And he monetizes anything? He has any ads? Or what does he do? So he monetizes it with a couple ads. And I knew guys who were the ad sellers.

Like he uses a third party. So it probably has Google AdSense and things like that in there. But he also uses like some like a third party direct seller, like a company that sells ads on it. And they said that it was like the best, the best, like the biggest site ever. Yeah. Dude, I'm on their site right now.

I'm asking to advertise because I want to get their info. Great hack for anybody who wants to know how many, how much traffic does something have, how many users does it have, how many listeners does this podcast have? Go to advertise. You inquire,

they'll tell you the info and you'll get a sense of it. Or you hit reply to their marketing emails, and there's typically a marketing manager on the other end who will tell you the answer. Right. So anyway, is this not fucking fascinating? It is.

And maybe I'm just an idiot and everybody out there's like, dude, of course I know drudge. I'm one of the 10 billion visitors. No, young people don't know this. I've literally, I've heard the name. I never even looked at it. Alan and Abrae, have you heard of this? Yeah, give us a F in the chat. If you know it, if you don't know it, give us something else.

Oh, okay, he knows. He knows about it now because we're talking about it. All right. One said yes, one said no. Gosh. He says, y'all sheltered. Nice. Okay, good.

Good comedy from the cat. Super interesting shit, man. And, um, so why doesn't the hustle have more visitors, dude? Look at this guy. This guy's, you know, killing it. Well, a few reasons. One, it's, it was definitely easier to, to build a cult following in 1998 when he launched, or, sorry, he launched in, uh, I don't know when he launched. It could have been in 98.

I mean, it's like, why, why doesn't let go beat Craigslist? It's like, well, because Craigslist has been around since 96 and they just gained market share real fast. Dude, there's a part of me that wants to just, like, create some ultra ego that just, does some Sean Hannity Milo unopolis style character that just says outlandish shit. I just want to see, could I do it? Could I, could I, you know, market my way to the top? The answer is yes. One of our friends did this, and he got a lot of traffic, and then he canceled it.

And he, like, ended the site because he's like, I just can't do this. This is the suck of my soul. But it worked really well. Got it. Okay. And by the way, typically conservative web. sites get way more page views and traffic than non-conservative sites. Yeah, this is now a conservative podcast, just so you know.

We don't talk about politics, but if that helps the downloads go up, we're conservative, and we appreciate your support. So my point in all this was I think news apps actually, if you charge money and you offer a similar offering as free ones, you can do a, you can actually make way more money than not. And to your thing earlier, so this also happens in China, like you said, So I think, I don't know how you say the name exactly, but it's like two Tiao or something like that. It's the, so Bight Dance, which owns TikTok.

Yep, that's another example of, that's just like user base in Japan. Yeah, they own, it's T-O-U, T-I-A-O. I don't know how you say it. But, and it's the same thing. It's this giant news app with like 20 million DAU or whatever. I don't know. It's like some like, it's just like very big for a news app, right? Like there's not, the U.S. doesn't have, I don't feel like news apps that are doing those types of numbers.

Actually, I'm going to look up there. I think it went public for like $20 billion. So, okay, I was way under. DAU 700 million, MAU, 1.5 billion. I knew I was under because I said 20 million DAU, and that's not that much. 700 million DAU, which is just insane. So, yeah, and they bought TikTok for kicks and giggles.

And I think that they spun that news app. They spun that news app off. So, opportunity here is I think that, News apps in America are way, way, way undermonetized. And right now, the demand in news is crazy high. With Trump being elected, everyone experienced what was called the Trump bump, which... Right. And doesn't Trump have his own news network, or what is this thing that he promotes?

This, oh, have you seen this thing? This news network he promotes instead of Fox now? No, what is it? He has this... So somebody back in the day had said, like, one of the... sort of one theory was that the reason he wanted to run was because yeah I thought that was a rumor yeah that was a rumor but he promotes this thing instead of um Fox News I have to find it's like oh something it starts with the oh it's a four letter domain for the news and he like promotes

this is like yeah this is the good news or whatever I'd never heard of this network before it's probably one of those right wing news networks that's like massive and I've never heard of it and nobody in my Twitter timeline talks about it so I just never see it but there's a lot A lot of people have tried this. It really hasn't worked that well. Ashton Coochard did it with, it's called Aplus, I believe it's called. And is it A plus? It's something involving his initials.

A plus K. A plus K, is that what it is? Yeah. And they got to like 40 or 50 million monthly Uniques. But then like Facebook and Twitter said, all right, we're going to, if you post links, we're actually not going to show you to a lot of users. And so it basically crashed. Little Wayne tried to do the same thing.

And then this is actually how BJPen.com, which is something you and I probably both read started. Yeah. Alan just posted in the chat. So it's called One America News Network, O'An. And I've seen Trump posting about this. I had never heard of this before. Had you ever heard of this thing? No, but it looks like it's owned by a larger company.

100 to 250 employees. Yeah, I don't know who owns this thing. But anyway, there's something there to dig into. But, okay, news apps, we like it. I'm personally more interested in this like drudge thing than the Japanese aggregators because the drudge thing blew my mind. But it's the same thing. This is my point. It's quite similar.

Right. Okay, cool. What else you got? You want to talk about neopatel.com? Okay, let's do it. So Neil Patel's this marketer guy, right? Yeah. He's been around forever.

He's only 35. He's been kind of a kind of crushing it since 2002. Or he was 22. He started Quick Sprout. It was a really cool blog. And one of the ways that Quick Sprout made money is they would write about SEO best practices and things like that. And then send leads to consultancies who would then help you with your SEO. So he eventually sold QuickSpout.

And then he started at Nealpatell.com and Neal Patel Digital.com. And he kept blogging about the same shit. And then he goes, you know what? Fuck it. I'm going to – well, first of all, he tried to launch his own software thing that did something similar called Kiss Metrics. It didn't work out. And then he said, fuck it, I'm just going to do my own consultancy. I think it's pretty fucking huge.

And all it is is an SEO consultancy. And I was doing research on it. And the way that he made this, and this is why it's interesting to people is everyone has ideas for agencies. And they're actually relatively simple businesses to start. You're just offering a service, but they're real shit to run. And they're hard to make a profit if you do incorrectly. And what he did that was interesting is, A, he opened up offices in Utah and San Diego, which are relatively cheapest, cheap places to live.

And second, he hired a CEO right off the back. that and all he does is he Googled blogs in order to get leads and he it took like a million bucks to start the thing so he definitely had money up front but it's really interesting and the way that he's doing it and his insight was he read slacks s1 so that's the document that they that they publish when they go public and his whole schick was he goes man slack's s1 the majority of revenue it came from bigger companies so the majority of revenue came from like 600 companies that were huge. And also the margins on maintenance and service revenue were significantly larger than the actual

software. So are you familiar with this? You mean the enterprise contracts where they say, okay, yeah, you know, there's a services, a professional services component to it. Yes. And so a lot of people, including myself, because I'm not an enterprise software, don't know this. But like at Atlassian, which is a large company, half the revenue is from maintenance and service.

Yeah. Is that crazy? It's crazy. AWS does this too. You spend whatever $30,000 a month, and they're like, oh, you need priority support. You need enterprise support just in case. You know, you have a good business, so you don't want to ruin this. And so you're paying $5K a month, $6K a month, and just to have the ability to ask questions if you need to ask questions.

It's mind-boggling. And so what Neil appears he has done is he goes, yeah, like, we're not actually going to sell the software because maybe one day we'll build something. we're actually only going to like, but we're going to like kind of run it a little bit like a software company, but we're going to make all of our money from that service, that service fee. And so they do a little bit of work, but in reality, they actually have software on the back end. But they're doing SEO work. So he's not selling leads. He's actually doing the SEO work.

Yes. But the interest, but why this is interesting to me is if you look at like I just, maybe this is not interesting to people who know what they're talking about, but I didn't. And I was like, wait, most of the margin is in the maintenance revenue. And so that's like where they're making all of their cash. It's a consultancy. And that's super interesting. And it got me wondering, like, man, if you just sell like relatively cheap software, and a lot of the software is not hard to get.

And you just add on a layer of service and maintenance. It's like, holy fuck, that's the way you do it. All right, this episode is brought to you by Super Side. So here's the deal. I'm incredibly impatient, like horribly impatient. I get an idea on midnight and on 8 a.m. the next day, I want it done. And unfortunately hiring people to get that stuff done is really time consuming. It takes forever.

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Love them. Yeah, that's one way. I first heard this because there's this guy on Twitter. I think I've shattered him out before. I grabbed dinner with this guy once, but his name's Chathen. Chathen P is his Twitter. So C-H-E-T-A-N-P, I think, something like that. And he's an investor at Benchmark, which is probably, you know, one of the top five venture funds in the country.

And he does Enterprise, he's specialized in the Enterprise. He just made the Midas list, which is like the, you know, VC, like whatever, 30-for-30, or 30-under-30 list, basically. And so anyways, he tweets out these little summaries about, enterprise companies where it's like seven bullet points and you understand how this company makes their money and how fast they're growing and like what he yeah what he highlights 30 uh no no i'm saying the midas list is like a bullshit list like the forbes oh oh oh um but anyways he he often post these like hey counterintuitive people think it's all about software look how much more look how much of their contribution comes from services hey you know everybody thinks you should

be adopted bottoms up look at this company they do the complete opposite so he's very good at pointing out They're like many ways to win. And that goes against sort of the conventional Silicon Valley wisdom, which is like, Silicon Valley wisdom is like, oh, technology gets adopted, bottoms up now. You don't have to sell. You know, you sell in later. No, that's bullshit. Look at Oracle.

It should be a software play. You don't want to have, you know, this heavy OPEX component. And it's like, you know, and so he just walks through a bunch of different examples of companies that are doing it very differently, like Pivotal and other companies like that. By the way, I bet most are doing it that way. Even if you look at Slack, they've got a fucking sales team. Yeah, of course, they have a sales team, but, like, you know, they're the example where it's like they grew like crazy from this bottom something and then they hired a sales team. But like many companies do the exact opposite and succeed.

I don't think that that's true. I bet if you learn about Slack, I bet you most of their revenue came from sales team people. I don't think so early on. I mean, they didn't have any sales people early on. So it couldn't have been that way, right? But I think the revenue then pales in comparison to where they are now. So, you know, whatever. Who cares?

Okay, so this Neil Patel guy, you think he's interesting. because what? Because, okay, so you thought the interesting part was that surprise, surprise, the software companies actually have a significant amount of money that's coming from this client services. That's interesting. Is there anything else about this Neil Patel guy that you think is interesting or that could be sort of replicated in some way? No.

Okay, cool. Well, you know, shout out to the Indian Indian. Yeah, there is one thing, which is his business, the way that he came to discover this business is really interesting. Whenever people ask me what company they should start if they don't. Like they're like, I'm not sure what to start. I always say start a blog. And the reason why is his insight, he's probably, I bet you he's made $100 million, this Neil Patel guy in profit over the last 10 years. I bet he's rolling in it. I'll take the under, but okay. Dude, I'm almost positive. Like, this is a huge. Clear the air. Neil, you hear this clear the air.

So Neil's, I think he's cousins with this guy, Heat and Shaw. I think that's why they started Kiss metrics together. Yeah, they're cousins. I bet you that he's probably done anyway. I bet it's quite large. And anyway, the way that he did this was he created Quick Sprout and then he looked at what sold well and just launched it. And there's two companies that have done this really well. The first is WPBeg, I mean, there's probably a ton.

The first one that I can name is WP Beginner. It's WP Beginner.com. It just blogs about interesting WordPress stuff. His name's Syed. I bet you Syed. I bet and so what he did was he looked at which WordPress plugins did best and then he just launched his own and then put his links in there and I bet I bet you he's got a little empire that does 40 million recurring revenue I've talked to like people who claim they know and it's around it's like in that ballpark and then the second one who's who did the same strategy which I am emulating is soft bank you know soft bank started this way yep that's right the news or sorry information then conferences then yeah so they just started a magazine and they looked at which ads did best and then they started or invested in those companies.

I like it. Okay, cool. So interesting to me. I got a couple topics for you. Tell me if these are interesting. So there's this thing called your mouse is hovering on this. I'm going to talk about it. I clicked it.

Book a YC team. So what this is is there's two guys who were in the YC batch and they weren't able to raise money. Their startup didn't work out. And so they created this website called Book a YC team. It's like, hey, you want to hire like a product and engineer from YC? Like two founders. We're badass.

We got into YC. That's like Harvard. You can just hire us. And we'll just be like a little two-man demolition crew for you for some price for some period of time. And so it's like the extreme high. It's the extreme high end of like the Gickster, Upwork, Fiverr. Like that's the low end of like hire a remote, like hire a developer to build your

thing. And this is the extreme like top end. It's like. And so I actually think there's a better product idea than their product was in YC. If they can get more failed YC startups to do this as an interim thing of like, hey, yeah, I do this while I'm in between figuring out what my next startup is. I think that's a very smart idea. So I thought that was cool. Any thoughts on that?

Amazing. I want to sign up for this. I want to sign up for this. My concern is that if they're from Y, I'm just going to be a hater. If they're from YC, it means that they're soft and care about the wrong stuff and don't move fast and they're just weak. Um, but great idea. I like it. Okay, I don't agree with that at all, but all right.

Neither of us would really know. That's just like funny. Um, okay. Dude, I just, my point is just like silicon, a lot of Silicon Valley people who make shit. They just launch slow. They do all the C user testing versus just like fucking do it. So my favorite thing is actually, um, is it say YC is funny that way. The people who go into YC, they're often extremely scrappy, you know, whatever, hardworking.

They're just one or two people who are building a whole thing on their own and ambitious. Then they get into YC. And then they dream. drink the YC Kool-Aid and it's like, oh, now by the way, oh, you were helping me before. Fuck you. I'm in YC. I don't need you anymore. Oh, you want to invest in my company?

It's a $15 million valuation. Right. It's like, what do you have? It's like, well, we haven't launched yet. Or like we have like two customers. And, you know, it's like the minimum buy in is $10 million valuation and easily we can get to 15 or 20. It's crazy.

And so then they get really like, you know, high and mighty. And then my favorite thing to do and also all the investors are talking about. to them around that same time. And it's definitely decreased because of this problem, but like, still, there's a lot of demand. The absolute best strategy I have is, I shouldn't even say this, I didn't even give this away, because it's such a good, it's such a good system. Give it three months after YC. So I don't care about Demo Day. I wait three months after YC, and then I go talk to all those founders. At this point, nobody else is talking to them. They've either already raised their round or they failed to raise their round and they're like humble, but they're, they're, and now reality

is hit where they're like trying to actually grow their business and the YC hype is off and like the YC short term gains that they were getting where they were like just trying to make a nice chart for Demo Day. It's over. And so when you meet them in the reality zone that they hit three or four months later, it's such a different conversation. And so you can invest on way better terms. You have way more real data to use because you're not just in the YC hype engine where you have one minute to hear about the business. This is my point. And so this whole like YC book a team thing, It could be cool because those people are generally very smart and a lot of their designs great. But if they're like soft and Madonna's, then are...

Well, I think what will happen is these are the YC teams that have gone through it and failed. And, you know, by then they are in a very different, like, I don't think they're soft. I think they are, you know, hardened by the opportunity, by the experience. And I would bet that they are some of the best talent you can pick up at that point in time. So if... I like this. I think this is cool. If I were these guys, I would not raise any money.

And I would just make, just fuck loads of cash office. Yeah, exactly. I agree. You're just farming the YC talent pipeline. Just start an agency just for YC companies. Guys, we'll build your shit for you. Right, exactly. Love this.

Okay, so another cool thing. Okay, so this one's super quick. I don't even know why I wrote this down. So there's this company called Remote, Remote.com. Yeah, they just raised a lot of money. Yeah, they've raised $11 million, I think. and they're doing something really smart, which is if you've ever tried to expand internationally, one of the biggest pain points is starting your own entity in the region.

So, like, we have this problem at Twitch all the time. It's like, hey, we're interested in this country. It takes like a year to spin up a legal entity in the country. Now you have to maintain that. There's a whole bunch of costs, a whole bunch of red tape. And you need it to be able to do, like some countries you need it to operate. Some countries you need it to be able to do ad sales, for example, in that region. So there's all these reasons why you need a local entity.

but having a local entity is really hard, and so to employ people and whatnot. So what remote's doing is they're doing the hard work of opening up legal entities everywhere, and then they are figuring out ways for you to use that entity to hire your remote staff as employees on the ground in that country. Okay, let's riff on that because I have a few cool insights. The first, well, this is everyone probably has those. You know, it's still hard to hire state over state line. Like state to state, it's hard.

And I've got, I've had to pay hundreds of dollars in penalties. Because I didn't I wasn't I have people now who handled this but when I first started I handled it You have to like keep track of like all your licenses for Texas and like I had one remote employee in Washington I had to like register there and shit and I just didn't do it and I didn't do it the right way I'd pay hundreds of dollars in fees for penalties it's quite hard to do that state to state Have you done that have you hired I've hired across states and I'm like most people where you don't even realize there's other shit you need to think about and right I didn't know until I got like a little from later yeah I just got like so and then I'm like where do I organize all this so yeah that's interesting another thing that's kind of cool is I wonder if so there's a whole bunch of companies or industries where you have to have a license to practice but if you only have one person who works at your company

who's licensed then you're okay so for example if you sell health insurance if you sell like so if you sell any type of benefits you have to be I believe you have to be a broker if you want to sell certain types of real estate you have to have a broker's license and oftentimes getting those licenses in every state can be challenging. So for example, Hymns, did I actually tell you about this? Hymns, when they want to sell their Viagra, state to state, they have to have a registered person. You can't, yeah, you can't, like, ship medicine across state lines. But that, this is a totally different topic, but that law actually has been suspended currently

so doctors can prescribe. Yeah. And so that, that's an interesting opportunity. That loophole might be closed, but that just happened a few weeks ago. But I guess what I mean is if you're saying that they are a registered agent in a certain state to practice a certain type of business, that's kind of interesting. You can do that for loads of different things. Right. And so I think what these guys are doing is cool.

The reason I initially liked it was because the founder's name is Job. And I was like, what your name is job and this is what you do? He's like, yeah, I was like, whoa, this is great. This is like, you know, a small little glint in my eyes when the fastest man on earth is named Usain Bolt. And I'm like, oh, wow, that's how the world is. It's amazing. The world is amazing. Are you sure it's not Job?

It's spelled JOP. So it's job to me. And I was like, dude, your name is job and you're about hiring people remotely. Like, this is fantastic. Dude, it's probably Job. Well, he's from, I think he's Dutch. I think he's from the Netherlands. Maybe I'm wrong.

I don't know. Sorry, I talked to it before. I thought about investing in this company. And I liked everything. I talked to the guy. Liked it. Like the premise. He had a win under his belt from Get Lab before this.

He was like super early there, number four or something. And then I didn't invest because I got busy. You should have. You missed out. I'm looking at him now. He kind of looks like the terrorists from Air Force One. Like the, like the, he looks like the Russian terrorist. He wears like track suits. All right. And moving on. Or from, or from, uh, uh, die hard with the vengeance. He looks like one of those guys. Yeah, dude. He's not soft. This guy's hard, dude. He's hard as Russian terrorist. Dude, Google his name and look at his headshot. He looks like a terrorist in call duty. I can't even Google.

I just Google Job Remote. I got a bunch of job boards to work remotely. His name's Job VanderVort. Yeah, that's right. All right, let me take it. I've talked to this guy on video chat. He looks good. He's a handsome guy.

What are you talking about? I'm not, I didn't say he's ugly. I just looked like he'll fucking kill you. Yeah, he looks like he'll fuck you up. Which I think you need to do international business like this. So, okay. Yeah, no, I like, I'm not criticizing. It's a compliment if you ask me.

He just doesn't, he just looks like he's selling nuclear arms, It's not like, you know, recruiting services. Okay, I got an idea for you. This is a boring idea, so you're probably not going to like it or maybe you'll like it. I don't know. So right now, one thing I'm learning, this is part of my import list from a big company, which is basically at a big company, one challenge is that you, like, head count is like oil. And so you like kind of, every division wants more head count.

The company raises money so that they can, or, you know, decide. every year how much head count they have is it's like a magic number and and so you know but then the problem is you know that's like it tells you hey you're going to hire 25 new heads this year that's your department that's what you've got but the problem is some people leave right so you have attrition but the problem is nobody knows how much attrition there's going to be and so I'm learning right now how big of a problem this is which is there's like HR people who are trying to model and excel and trying to go back through this stuff and try to figure out okay year over year what's our percent attrition how many how many people leave the job?

job, 15% a year, how many are going to leave this quarter? And you need this to do financial planning so you know how much you're going to spend. You also need it to figure out how much to hire, because you don't just think about, okay, if we're going to do this amount of work, we need to hire this many more people. You have to take into account that you're going to also lose people. And nobody knows how much you're going to lose. So I think there's something around attrition for big companies, which is either a much better modeling system, an automatic projection system, forecast system for attrition. It takes your historical data. It can take the job, other companies, jobs, other company attrition and tell you, hey, a lot of people are switching jobs right now.

Or like for COVID, we predict that a lot of people are not going to switch jobs right now due to the uncertainty of the economy and like how isn't isn't this a thing? Isn't this what PeopleSoft did? Maybe, I don't know. I don't use PeopleSoft, but I know that like we use Workday and other things like that and this doesn't come baked in for that or at least we don't use it. That's interesting. So like if I wanted to get rich and I like software, I absolutely would do.

something in that field. There's another version of this, which is just if you can help companies figure out who's going to leave. So, like, one thing that happens when I open up my computer sometimes is Amazon has this internal, what they call a Pulse survey. It's a quick, one question that pops up, and you just answer it, and it's a very lightweight, and it helps them collect data about, like, you know, how employees are feeling or whatever, right?

And so I think it'd be interesting. If you could find a way to make it where employees would feel comfortable saying if they're thinking about searching, if they are job searching. And they know it's totally anonymized and protected, but it helps the company figure out, oh, shit, you have this percentage of your engineers that are thinking about leaving the company. So map that to potential attrition. So I think there's something to solving this attrition problem for companies.

I think there's a business there. I don't know too much about it because I just Google it. I just Google it. And there's a few headlines. IBM's AI-backed employee retention software can predict within 95% accuracy which workers want to leave their job or are going to leave their job. This is cool. This is a great idea. Algorithm can tell you when they want to hear what's going well with employees, what isn't,

and they will tell you within 95% certainty if they're going to leave. That's pretty cool. There's something to this. Okay. And then there's one other thing I wanted to talk to you about, which is do you know who this guy is, Yishong and Wong is. Have you heard this name before? Yeah, he was the CEO of Reddit. Yeah, he's the CEO of Reddit. In 2005, he was at Facebook, so he was very early at Facebook.

It seems like a super smart guy, to be honest. And I've been reading his blog for a while. I think this guy's smart, but I didn't know what he was doing. And I just heard he's up to, like, a new company. And so I was like, all right, anytime there's somebody who I think is really, really interesting and they're doing something, I want to know what it is. And it's pretty ambitious. And I wanted to talk about it. So he's literally trying to solve global warming by planting a bunch of trees. And, okay, so what does that mean? You're really going to solve climate change? And so he has this blog post called a massive, a massive global reforestation project

is how we fix climate change. And he walks through just sort of his logic one by one. And this reminds me of like, I love this shit. I remember reading Elon Musk's secret master plan that he published back before Tesla was famous. And I remember reading that and being like, wow, this is like really audacious. Who's this Elon Musk guy? Okay, he did this PayPal.

I'll zip to, you know, he did this other company. I should pay attention to this because this guy, this sounds pretty audacious and, you know, I can't disagree with the logic here. And that's how I felt when I was reading this. Now, I think this is out of my depth scientifically, so I don't know if this is legit, but he's a legit guy, and so I respect that he's looking into this. Is this a business? It's a business.

How does it make money? I don't know yet, because he hasn't released too many details. In fact, he hasn't, like, announced that he was really doing this. He just posted one blog post about theoretically, how would you do it? So he just walks through, look, we produce, you know, 45 gigatons of carbon dioxide every year. And the best way to get rid of carbon dioxide is forests to get rid of this amount of, we know how much one acre absorbs. So that means we need three billion acres of forest. Where are we going to get that?

Well, it turns out we know how to turn deserts into forests. And we've been doing this in China and Israel and other places. And so he's like, all right, there's 4.7 billion acres of desert available. We need $3 billion to solve the climate change problem, to absorb all the CO2 we're emitting. And he's like, okay, so what's the problem there? Well, to turn a desert into a forest, you need irrigation. To do that, you need solar energy. To do that, you need this.

And so he's literally walking through. And now he bought a little, I think he bought a plot of land in Hawaii where he's doing a proof of concept for this. Yeah, I'm reading about it. In August 17th, 2019, he launched this or he announced it. So if you Google Yishan Wang, so Y-I-S-H-A-N-W-O-N-G, trees, and then just the word trees, you'll see two posts on Medium. Dude, this is fascinating as shit. This is awesome.

I don't know how it makes money, but it's cool. Yeah, if he says the world fantastic, I don't know if it makes money or not, but, you know, he talks about like, okay, the cost of this solar project, you know, obviously this is a lot. It's like, I don't know, it's like a single-digit trillion. He's like, but the global GDP is this much, you know, could we dedicate 3% of the global GDP to solving climate change? I think we're going to need to. And, um, and, um, and amazing. So I think it's amazing.

And I love that like, you know, he didn't come out on tech crunch. You know, you don't read about this on tech crunch. The reason I found this was because a local Hawaiian newspaper was talking about, hey, this guy's trying to plant a forest over here on this little area. And I was like, that's legit that he's like actually doing the work. So like respect for actually going and doing the work. working on one of the biggest, hardest problems to solve. So that's why I like this guy. How rich do you think this guy is?

And do you think he's able to do this because he's rich? Or is he, like, what do you think is going on here? I would guess, you know, if you're at Facebook 2005, that's really, you could be worth $100 million. That's really early. Yeah, he could easily be worth $100 million. I don't know what his role was there exactly. He worked as a senior engineer at PayPal from 2001 to 2005.

Right. He joined Facebook as a single digit millions. He joined Facebook as a senior. director of engineering in 2005. So, at least tens of millions, I think, and the IPO.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, if you said he has $100 million in the bank, I would not be surprised. Yeah. So anyways, I think this is badass and,

I don't know, pretty inspiring. It's called terror formation. I think it is inspiring. And my takeaway from this is, yeah, the climate change, awesome.

I'm not like crazy passionate about it, but I support it totally. I think it's neat. My big takeaway, way that was like the type of balls you have to have in order to have these ambitions and to follow through with it I find that to be the most inspiring exactly um there's also this meme I saw which was and you know great I'm going to describe a meme on a podcast it's hard to say but like it's basically two scientists and they're looking at the coronavirus two two little humps like one that's a

you know we've all seen this diagram now of like one curve and then the flattened curve and so they're looking at it and it's like the height of their shins and they're like they're looking at that And then behind them is the climate change hump, which is like 10 times their height. And it's like, yeah, I hope we get through this. And it's like, because there's a much bigger problem coming. And I think, you know, I could have never imagined there's a world where all businesses shut down. Everybody has to stay in their home.

Like I thought that's a nuclear bomb. Like, I thought there's the only way that this is the case is like there's a nuclear bomb or like, I don't know, some crazy terrorist shit. And, you know, coronavirus did this to us in like a month. You know, when we hit the tipping point for climate, change, you know, who knows what the world is going to look like and what's going to happen. It's pretty scary. Do you think that you're going to go work from the office again?

No, I actually told my company, I was like, I don't think I'll ever go commute to the office again. Yeah, our lease in the, our lease in San Francisco is like 14K a month. And I think it ends in May. And I don't know. I mean, everyone in their head's like, yeah, like, there should be. be like a service where you can like rent it and like only go some of the time and I'm like uh you mean we work like yeah that's a thing and it's great I don't know why like everyone hated on it a few

months ago so I think we're I imagine us doing a we work dude that's interesting because at the beginning of this you were like dude I hate remote I hate this I don't believe in this yep and my opinion changes a humble and smart man can admit when he's changed and is wrong so I am humble and smart. All right, we got to end on that. That's great. You got anything else you want to shout out? No.

Maybe we will have things to shout out soon. We're going to be, we're going to start, I want to work on some projects like some private Q&A's. Okay. Nice. We'll shoot those out, shout those out later.

All right. Sounds good. So yeah, thanks for listening.