The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Zine, Zenaton, Mind Maker on Product Hunt & Other Tech News Sept 30, 2019

Episode Date: September 30, 2019

Zine, Zenaton, Mind Maker on Product Hunt & Other Tech News Sept 30, 2019

Hi folks, this is Foss here from thechrisfossshow.com, thechrisfossshow.com. Hey, we're coming here with another great podcast. I wanted to take a share with you. I certainly appreciate you guys spending some time with us. On Monday morning, it's morning time. It's morning time in the world. You may have heard of it. That's when the coffee gets consumed.

You take your tasty coffee beverage you shove it in your pie hole and you uh shove another one in and another one in and after that you might be awake enough to be able to do some shit when it becomes slaves to coffee why am i knocking coffee yesterday was national coffee day so there was that and uh yeah whatever so shut up chris let's move on with the news. What the hell's going on in the world today, Chris? I don't know. It's the world, man.

It's got its own fucking agenda. Last time I checked, it doesn't check with me on these things. So I don't know what you want me to do. So let's start off the top of the hour. We always talk about Product Hunt, ProductHunt.com. And looking across Product hunt this morning i didn't see a lot of interesting stuff there wasn't anything that really stuck out of me um there is a company called zine which is pretty interesting they uh will turn your instagram feed into beautifully designed websites it's getting a high number of marks on it uh and uh and, uh, you know,

maybe you can check it out. Design basically takes your Instagram feed and, uh, you can turn into a website because I don't know, you're too lazy to make a WordPress or something. Uh, I don't know, man. Uh, it does look cool. I got to tell you, you can go to design.press to check this out. And, uh, it basically makes kind of a really cool looking pretty wordpressy looking sort of website using your uh instagram feed so i haven't got a chance to try it out or check it out but it does seem like it's getting a lot of votes it's about 215 of those right now and it's number three product of the day the number one product today is a developer product and i'm not a developer a company called zeniton it's got 501 uh that's i guess zappier for developers and it controls flows than apps 10 times faster so now that's

really popular there's another thing that's a newsletter called maker mind the mindful productivity newsletter that's got a lot of votes that's on Product Hunt as well. You can check that out. You can go to their website to scope it at makermind.neslabs.com, the Mindful Productivity Newsletter. I think I'm going to subscribe to this because I need to be more productive as well and get my butts going. So this might be kind of an interesting thing to try. Can't hurt. What the hell? Give it a whirl.

See what you think. All that sort of good stuff. So check them out. They claim to have over 2,400 mindful makers. It's a weekly newsletter at the intersection of neuroscience and entrepreneurship with science-based tips to make the most of your brain. I need to make the most of my brain because there's not much left. There's not much left. The brain's gone.

People, it left, it, it didn't even, it left me a note said, thanks for the stay, but, uh,

we can't be together anymore. Uh, you're just not my type. I was like, what, what, what? I didn't know we were having problems. I thought we were in couples counseling, but evidently there's not enough couples counseling in the world to save me. So, uh, there's that man. And, uh, yeah. So check that out at maker mind.nestlabs.com. It seems pretty interesting. I'm going to play with it. Um, you know, maybe I can, you know, the one thing about being an entrepreneur is you've got to always be expanding your mind. You got to learn to think outside the box and different ways of, um, doing things can be pretty interesting. Here's something else that's on Product Hunt that I thought was interesting as well as I'm cruising across it.

Instagram Caption Writer. Simple tool that enables you to create beautiful Instagram captions for your posts with hassle-free numbered lists and line breaks. Okay, man. Like we're really getting deep and posting i thought i was just posting beautiful pictures of my puppies on instagram but no that's not true people do that wait it's a russian website yeah no never mind why don't we just scrap that they have a russian website i'm not even gonna plug them let's just back that step away back away from the russians

um yeah i don't want the Russians. I'm with it. I'm sorry, Russians. I'll, yeah, I'm sure you're wonderful people. Some of you, but your internet's like totally, uh, like watched by, by your boys and, and, uh, the Kremlin. And I'm not into that sort of thing. I already had enough of the, what they did to our elections.

Uh, what else kind of stuck out with me? This is kind of funny. This is actually the one of the, it's not at the bottom, but it's close. It's a thing called emoji note where you can organize your notes with emojis like kill yourself. Holy shit. Seriously. If I are, is this the future? Are we just going to like abolish language and just start talking emojis? I think I saw this on the Idiocracy movie where people just start talking in, I don't know, stupid flip sayings. So, I don't know, man. If you're writing notes and emojis, like, I don't know. Like, I don't know, man. If you're writing notes and emojis, like, I don't know. Like, I don't know, become an adult?

I don't know what to tell you, man. That's just weird. This is kind of interesting that sticks out at me. I can't even pronounce the name of this. Zaun Cohen M1K. It's the world's first carbon fiber gaming mouse i don't know why you need a carbon fiber gaming mouse but they do have it launched on kickstarters it's the world's lightest gaming mouse maybe that's why that or maybe it needs to be carbon fiber so when you throw it against the

wall when you lose your video game uh gameplay uh you can uh you can take and uh i don't hopefully it'll survive because it's carbon fiber anyway it's designed and made in germany that's why i can't pronounce their bloody name you can go to kickstarter.com and search for world's first carbon fiber gaming mouse since i can't pronounce their name zonkoing m1k jesus christ sounds like some kind of blitzkrieg or something i don't know anyway i guess they're doing well they had a ten thousand dollar goal and they're tripling that right now uh i didn't really know that i needed a gaming or carbon fiber gaming mice we're gonna have to read some more about this evidently it's really light they show a picture of it sitting on a weight machine that's weighing it so um yeah i guess whatever man i don't know man it's i i i'm clearly the biggest

problem i have in life is i don't make shit because i think of like cool stuff to make and then i go yeah i'm just gonna buy that crap but't know. I mean, I'm not calling it crap. I'm just saying that, you know, sometimes people make stuff and it's just like, it's just like, what? You know, it's kind of like how things got really stupid with the Uberization disruption of everything where people like, Hey man, you should Uber Uber. And you're like, what? There's already a Uber. No but uber should uber uber or where the we're

gonna be the uber of uber you're like wait this is becoming a parody uh when you're trying to be the uber of uber uber whatever just punch yourself in the face because that's really what we all think about what you're trying to do there it just got stupid they're like we're gonna be the uber of scrambled eggs you know like what what is that is that gonna get you funding is that we have to do for funding these days so I don't know man whatever works for you as long as doesn't hurt everybody and everyone's a consenting adult age uh i guess it's kind of okay i don't know what is it my business so some interesting things there on the product

hunt today let's go through some of the news the news the news in the morning chris what the fuck is going on in this world so uh this is interesting because if you've been following we've talked about it multiple times on the chris voss show podcast um the we work ipo uh it's been really interesting how this thing has just been falling apart uh we'll get to some other discussions about some of the other things it's kind of been interesting to watch over the latest years of these ipos of these companies that are, uh, crazily overvalued with these really, um, unstable balance sheets and questionable, uh, revenue, uh, uh, claims, um, as to how their last throws, like, it's almost like we're almost out of business hurry doing IPO so I get some more fucking cash because you're in like the ENF rounds of financing which is there never mind so and so they basically go they basically go and just just dump into these they just go dump into these areas where they just launch.

And then when they do, they crash. Like Twitter did that for a lot of years. They went in and crashed. Facebook went in and crashed, but I believe that was more of a NASDAQ problem and a launch problem. They couldn't handle the demand for it, and it just became a shit show, and then it became a bad smirch on the company's reputation. They, of course, are making

a profit. So I can't really throw Facebook into that thing. But WeWork, clearly from what was going on with their balance sheet and their structure, their CEO had to step down. And I believe he's still in the chair, chairman, one of the chairs, I don't know. But there was a whole conundrum of how they were, I guess they were making up some of their terms. They were using their accounting like, and, uh, I guess one trick they were doing was they're billing invoices for a year in the future. Uh, you know, most people count revenue when it comes to the door, but they were sending out invoices for a year's worth of billing in the future, which is kind of a weird way to go because somewhere or another in a year, you're going to

have to catch all that up and bring it even. And that means you lose a whole year after you count it. I don't know how that works. So anyway, they put in a new CEO and they are pulling back its S1 filing and postponing its IPO. And they say they're going to go work on their core business, which is probably what they should have done in the first place. But it's really interesting to me how they pretty much were coming to market with an IPO, hoping to save them from their cash flow and revenue and all sorts of other problems they have with their company. And, you know, they got called out.

One of the reasons they got called out was because there's been so many IPO launches in the last year from the tech industry that have bombed and been real problematic. I believe Lyft was one. I'm just going from memory. I know Uber is one. Speaking of Uber, in the Washington Post this morning, they are talking about the fast declining morale at Uber amid budget cuts for basic amenities, mass layoffs, and a 30% decline in stock prices with its IPO.

If you check the IPO stock price in Uber, hopefully you don't own it, it peaked in June about 46-ish and some change. And now, as of today, it's 30 so and it really has never recovered I believe from its its whole opening with the thing it opened at about what was it 41 and some change and now it's at 30 so kind of really disappointing for the market and people are starting to see it it's of course under attack by regulators in California who are trying to force it to pay wages and not skirt the independent contractor thing. So there's that as well. So it's kind of interesting how some of the shape stuff is shaping out.

Is it going to have an impact on Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley's startup culture, et cetera, et cetera. Who knows? We'll see. There certainly seems to be the, the kind and values, startup culture, et cetera, et cetera. Who knows? We'll see. There certainly seems to be the kind of, the glean seems to be off where reality is starting to kick into some of these things.

This is from the Wall Street Journal. House investigators have asked Google about plans to implement DNS over HTTPS in Chrome. ISPs fear the protocol will prevent them from tracking user data. We saw that a couple months ago that Google made the announcement that they were, they kind of flew this sort of balloon out, trial balloon out sort of thing saying they were going to change tracking cookies for third party operators and stuff, which kind of meant like we're not going to share the third party you know data with people but we're going to keep it for ourselves so they can pay

for it you know clearly a monopolistic sort of um like you know cutting off of the of the garden uh so that's going to be kind of interesting that's the wall Journal. You can read that article as well. Fred Wilson, who's a very brilliant investor, I think it's Union Square Ventures, on his AVC blog, he wrote a VC narrative that software-enabled companies like Uber should be valued at 10 times revenue, is falling apart, but is still valid for startups with margins of 75%. You know, I grew up as a stockbroker and was trained to be a stockbroker. And I remember the old days when you used values of 10 to 15 times P earnings to evaluate a stock. If it was higher than that, you called it out as bullshit

and one that was going to overhype and was going to crash. But then we came in the tech era and it changed everything. It just got stupid. But what are you going to overhype and was going to crash. But then we came to the tech era, and it changed everything. It just got stupid. But what are you going to do? Let's see. What else do we have in the news? This is kind of interesting for the New York Times. It's a look at how tech firms and government keep failing to curb the sharing of child sex abuse images

long after the Protect Our children act was passed in, in a way this is really disturbing. I think there's another article on this too, that came out today that I saw somewhere on my feet. I don't have in front of me, but it talked about how child porn is flooding the internet. This is highly disturbing. This is going on.

It's highly disturbing that we can't somehow put a stop to it, but I don't know. I don it. But I don't know how. Somehow you've got to build AI algorithms or something that can identify the difference between facial recognitions of people. Here's my little Johnny at the baseball park and people who are despicable that are posting stuff. I mean, the only upside of all of this is when we do catch people that are doing it, it makes it easier to catch them because they're usually sharing this stuff.

There was a recent article, I believe yesterday, about a person who was in the Army who was actually posting child porn and asking for people to comment on it, and that's how they got them flushed out. So maybe it's better. On one hand, I guess, I don't know flushed out so maybe it's better on one hand i guess i don't know i don't know what's better what's not and the whole thing's just a horrific

nightmare of whatever hell if you're if you're if you start looking at children as sexual beings please kill yourself take yourself out and uh and uh and uh yeah that's just i don't know what to say about that so anyway that's an article you don't know what to say about that. So, anyway, that's an article. You can check it out in New York Times if you want to. This is interesting. Reuters, ByteDance, owner of TikTok, had a revenue of $7 billion to $8.4 billion in H1 2019. They posted a profit of June of operating a loss of H1 2019.

So TikTok is really huge. I'm seeing a lot of my social media friends and relatives and all the people that are on social media. Relatives? I have relatives on social media. They're on social media trying to do their, they're on TikTok trying to get it. And I think everyone's finally recognizing this is a new thing. You know, come to backtrack about what I was talking about earlier. Snap was another one of those

companies that kind of was starting to hit the skids financially and looking skittish with their user numbers and stuff. And they threw themselves into an IPO. Two of the owners, I believe, took a billion dollars each or something in income or in stock, whatever.

And basically, you know, the thing's been a dog ever since. I don't think anybody uses Snap anymore that I know, except probably some bunch of kids, some Gen Zers or something. But I don't think it's even what it used to be. And so there's that. In fact, they're still making more spectacles because, I don't know, they realize that no one's using Snap anymore. So what else do we have? Wall Street Journal sources.

Facebook is planning to pay only about a quarter of the 200 publishers that will be featured in its news tab set to launch as soon as the end of October. I really hate this crap. This is more walled-off garden crap. It's kind of October. I really hate this crap. This is more walled-off garden crap. It's kind of interesting. They're trying to wall off their garden,

hold publishers into a position of having to pay to get people to read their stuff. I mean, I guess this is a competition of who gets control over readers' eyes or not. And it's a valid one. Everyone's fighting to be the place everyone goes to for the internet. Uh, I guess you got to give them that one, but, uh, it just seems so disingenuous. Um, I don't know, man. Um, if people pay to be the top of the newsfeed, do you really want to trust those sources? I mean, imagine like, you know, top, top news feed do you really want to trust those sources i mean imagine like you know top top news agencies like wapo and new york times they've got the bank to do it and

they're legitimate but you know i'm just wondering if it's going to be filled with all sorts of crazy kook websites that pay to be in the top of the thing man but maybe i don't know maybe they'll charge enough where they can't afford it and get it done This is kind of interesting Wall Street Journal's reporting this crypto exchanges including coinbase Kraken circle and Bittrex form the crypto ratings council to rate digital assets on whether they are securities This sounds like a good idea. I love coinbase and Definitely having more oversight in this industry is really important uh self regulation you know kind of could be important so i think everyone kind of self-regulating or not

self-regulating everybody kind of uh getting together to regulate stuff and just kind of clean up everything i think that's a good idea and it can work well. So there you go. Anyway, that's kind of some of the top of the news that stuck out at me at the hour. Some of the things that I thought were interesting that are going on in the world. If you have any comments or you want to be on the show, contact me at the show. You can contact me at chrisvoss at thechrisvossshow.com. And you can submit if you want to be on the show as a guest, or if you just want to ask me a question,

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