This Week in Startups - Airbnb's category search, Coinbase's new disclosure + Facebook exits podcasting with Ashley Carman | E1457

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

First Jason and Molly open by digging into some details for the All-In Summit (02:12). Then they discuss Airbnb's search options (08:13), Airbnb's new aircover insurance feature (21:34) and Coinbase's disclosure that account funds aren't safe in a Coinbase bankruptcy  (35:04). Then, Molly is joined by Ashley Carman to talk about Facebook dropping podcasts (54:46). 00:00 Molly tees up today’s show 02:12 Jason and Molly are ready for All In Summit, “Details matter” 08:13 Airbnb's search options 12:33 Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist 13:49 More on the new Airbnb search options, where could Airbnb take it? 20:29 Odoo - Get your first app free and a $1000 credit at https://odoo.com/twist 21:34 Airbnb's insurance feature: aircover 33:55 Coda - The All-in-one doc for teams, get a $1,000 credit at https://coda.io/twist 35:04 Coinbase released a filing this morning that sent some into a panic, stock down another 22% today 53:00 Jason heads out to Miami for All In Summit 54:46 Ashley Carman joins to talk about Facebook dropping podcasts FOLLOW Ashley: https://twitter.com/ashleyrcarman FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Welcome to this week in startups. It is Wednesday, May 11th, and Jason is already on a plane to Miami, but he stayed around just long enough to do a show with me. We have got an update on Airbnb's new features. I have already started my search for a vacation involving both a castle and then hopefully a trip to the Northern Lights in the Arctic. We're going to break some of those down and talk about Airbnb's discipline as a company in continuing to innovate, even into a potential downturn.

Speaking of a downturn, And we also dig into Coinbase's filing this morning that sent some investors into a panic in which Coinbase speculated on a hypothetical situation in which it could go bankrupt and what could happen to coins of yours that are held on Coinbase. And then we speculate on what actually could cause Coinbase to go bankrupt. Then we've got Ashley Carmen from Bloomberg to come on for a quick update on what is happening in the world of podcasts, including Facebook, getting in. to the podcasting world and out of the podcasting world in 13 short months. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by lemon.io. Need to speed up your product development without draining your budget. Hire vetted engineers from Europe at lemon.io. Go to lemon.io slash twist to get 15% off for the first four weeks. Odu. Odu is a fully

customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. Your first app is free forever, and right now, Odu is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at Odu.com slash twist. That's O-D-O-O-O-com slash twist. And Coda. Cota is the all-in-one doc for teams. If you've got a stack of niche workflow tools

or if you're buried in docks and spreadsheets, Coda is the dock that brings it all together. Startups can get a $1,000 credit at coda.io slash twist. Hey, everybody. Welcome. Welcome to Wednesday. We're just getting to the top of the mountain and we're going to have eyes on the descent. You're here with us and we're taking a slide down.

I'm getting on a plane to Miami. I'll see you all there. I've got to do a little walk through. you know, check stuff, Molly. You are a detail beast. I am not trying to flatter you, but I've never seen anything like it. Like, audience, you have no idea the level of detail that Jason is aware of, brings up, thinks about. Like, it is, it is.

Go ahead. Tell them. What example stands out in your mind that's making people lose their minds? I mean, he's like, do we have umbrellas? Do we have like a person over here? Is there going to be a this thing? Is there a room for this? is there this?

How many sandwiches are there? Whoa, whoa, whoa, I looked into this quote and there's like six things in here that don't make sense. Get rid of this one,

this one, this one. Nobody should be charging you for that. Who is it? And I'm just like, how many jobs do you know how to do? Well, here's the thing. I never had resources to hire anybody when I had the magazine,

when I did events. So I just was like, I would just use my common sense. And people were like, okay, yeah, we'll do catering. It's $175 a person. I'm like, I don't explain that to me because a sandwich is $10.

Yeah. And soda pop is, Two bucks. So where's the other, and oh, you give it a cookies. That's $15. And you got to deliver them, okay? So that's $100 for the delivery. Like, where does the other $150 come in?

Well, that's our profit. I'm like, you guys make $150 on it, $10 sandwich with a cookie? I mean, I'll just go buy them myself. And they're like, yeah, you can do that. I'm like, okay. And how we just hire people? Right. And then send them to delis and buy 100 sandwiches or boxes and put it in the front.

I literally did that. I'm not doing that this time for all that. I have a waiter is and stuff. But I will look at the thing. and say like, okay, if we're going to have a gelato station, how many people is it serving? And they're just like, because people are just like, oh, do you want gelato? $18 a person. And I'm like, you're like, I'm sorry, what now?

And they're like, yeah, it'd be like $30,000. I'm like, $30,000. I'm like, $10 a serving, $5,000, $1,000 to bring their cart, $6,000 is the right price. Boom. And you can have like a reasonable discussion with people. What's so awesome is it's also the fact that like you thought of the gelato station in the first place. It's not like some caterer was like we should have a gelato. A gelato station or an event thing, Jason's like, I want a gelato station.

People love that. It's going to be over here. It's going to look like this. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Like, don't pass stuff. Here's the thing at a party. Leave all this in the show, by the way, because this is good stuff for people to know. You know what?

Everybody wants to pass stuff. I said, enough with the past. That's the worst. I, if I want a gelato. How the hell are you going to eat a thing? Exactly. And then I don't want to be like chasing the person. Just tell me what the fricking gelato station is.

I'm going to go get a gelato. Then I go find my wife. You got to try this gelato. I want to go back and find the gelato. I don't want to try to chase a waiter around. And it's a waste of time. Why do we have to have all these waiters here? Nobody wants to find the waiter to get a little.

It's labor. It's unnecessary. You put a gelato station. People come up, they see all the gelato. Then I was like, hey, how put a dessert wine and some biscotti and some groppa? Set up a station for that. I like stations. The food's behind the counter.

It's not a buffet. I like a station. And then they do this Italian stuff. And I'm like, this is great Italian food. But where's the steak Florentine? They're like, oh, you know, we didn't think of that. And I'm like, you, come on. Are you even, do you even Italian, bro?

And then they're like, oh, yeah, we're going to have like, you know, we're going to do the Havana party. I'm like, okay, where's the churro? Where, you know, like, let's go. Let's have good food here. So I mean, I'm like really doing the detail stuff. I mean, the detail stuff. Million dollars on three parties.

I'm just saying it is like watching a maestro. He's just like plate, plate, plate, plate, plate plate plate, plate. This steel memo over here. and the da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-d, and then the, like, the churros and the gelato. It all comes from my dad. When I worked at the restaurant, he just told me details matter. Yeah. He was like, they do?

You know, the way I cut the bread and brought the butter to the table, when it got to the table, you know, just when we took the bread and butter off the table, there was a reason you did things. And I was like, pour it. No, no, no. Take the glass. Bring it over here. Pour it over here. I'm like, I can just do it like this. And he's like, you're going to spill it on.

Eventually, I spilled it on some poor lady. And I thought, okay, I'm going to do it. my dad's like, take the glass off the table, pour the water, you know, over the ground, not over the person's lap. And it's, you know, you've ever been at a table and some bus boy is that over your head with the water? And I don't know. Right.

Come on right. Right. Right. Too close. Too close. Take the glass, move it over. You fill it up. You're good.

Yeah. And then there's like really fine things. You know, you got that water glass. You need to look at the glass, Molly. How much ice is in it? Okay. There's no ice left? Well, I'm not pouring water in that glass.

The person's a slow drinker. Now I'm taking the pitcher. I'm turning it sideways, pouring it sideways, so I get some ice over the lip. So I get ice in their glass. Now, if there are glass is still filled with ice, they're a fast drinker. I'm going to take it off. I'm going to use the little spigot at the tip. So I'm just pouring water on top.

I don't need to pour more ice into it. It's going to overflow. It's a little like detail. It taught me how to pour a glass of wine. You pour the wine, and you just do a little twist at the end as you're lifting up. So you're coming up on the angle and twisting the bottle. That last little drop then spins around the top of the little. wine bottle and doesn't drip on the table bottom.

I do love that. Whenever I see that, I'm always like, because it's the worst. It's a little twist. You got a little wrist there, you're a little twist and up, twist and up. And you keep it right above the glass. So if you do happen to, hmm, not the end of the world. A little glass. Nobody's mad.

Nobody's mad. No, nobody even notices it. So details matter, folks. Jason is actually doing all of this at the islands. He's going to have a wine pouring lesson. You could learn anything. Well, I mean, listen, the poor people have to work. for me you have to suffer through this as well because I'm like this deal memo how did you write that

opening sentence like there's a and they do have to get the gelato stand on one week's notice you got your own version of the gelato stand I'm like where's the strattatella let's go how do you know what comes out of it great well I mean experience matters and speaking of experience in our first story yes let's do it uh Chesky who email me today is coming on the pod by the way Email me today. And he was like, hey, when am I coming on your pond? And I was like, absolutely. We'll do that right after All-In.

Right after All-N summit. So Brian will be on and we're going to go over the history of Airbnb and the lessons he learned so much there. I hope it goes into a two-parter. So yesterday, Brian teased. And I think you brought this up last week, Molly, that tomorrow morning Airbnb will be different. Yep. And I watched the video of him explaining it. You could see the joy in his face.

They have been very slow about changing that. product. They were, they've been very methodical. So, um, I don't know if we should play his video clip or do you want to describe it first, Molly. Um, it's a little long. Perfect. So what we get sports guess it. Yeah. That's, all right. Molly, sports guess it's absolutely perfect. So if you're not watching, if you're listening to the pod, YouTube.com slash this weekend, hit subscribe, hit the bell. Uh, and you can find this video there. All the shows are numbered and dated, but, uh, producers here here is do a great job because he made sure, because details. Because details matter. But you'll see a lot of video in here. And you know, here's the thing about detail.

is Molly. You know what the trick to doing details is? You just look at each little thing you do. You say, can I think of two or three ways to make a five or ten percent better? Sometimes you can't, in which case you ask somebody else who's an expert. But if you can, then you just share that with people, hey, would this be better? You can phrase it like a question to your team. So sometimes you'll see me say to the team, would it be better? That's me floating the idea. And sometimes it's obvious that'll be better. Like in this case, playing a short clip on a sprint, Sportscast, it's better. It's like, let's do that. We don't need the whole six-minute video. It's too long.

No, people can watch it on their own. So here we go. Let's bring it up. We'll see what we got here. Okay. What our first clip is here. So the big thing that they, the big thing that they announced is this, this change to search, which feels kind of incremental at first, especially since he was like Airbnb will look totally different and it's going to be a magical new experience. However, it is the more you watch this video. Yeah. Super cool. Like, let's just say that you were like, I don't know, I need a vacation idea.

I'm going to go look for a castle. I'm really into surfing. I want to go to a really design intensive house. I want to find a tree house. It's one of the examples. Yeah. Exactly. I want to go to the Arctic.

I want to bed and breakfast. I want to go to the desert. And then it will give you options in all of those locations. So you don't even really have to pick like a town or a state. You're kind of picking for the experience first. I dare I say you pick a vibe?

You pick a vibe. I mean, it's a vibe. The new app, Brian, team, Joe, everybody over. Congratulations. Pick a vibe. Like if you want the Arctic vibe, I mean,

you just kind of picked your vibe and you go. It's kind of like the spotification of Airbnb. Oh my God. It's like a roll your own, yeah. It's like, you know, details matter. How many times do you want to take a vacation?

You're like, okay, Palm Springs. But you might just want to be somewhere hot. Right. You might just want warm, sunny. Yeah. And you're like, okay, warm, sunny Palm Springs. But you may not know about St. Louis Obispo. You may not know about what's that place everybody goes outside of L.A.

That's like a bunch of hippie-dippies. I forgot the name of it. Anyway, it's a lot of hippie-dippy stuff, you know, you can go to. And, you know, I think it's a nice way to navigate. I wonder if that's a category. Hippie-Ditch. Joshua Tree is another one. There's 56 categories.

Which is great. And you know what? Great. You saw this. Sometimes the street finds its own use for technology. Shout out William Gibson. And what he meant by that was, like, you put the tech out there and the individuals will find a use for it. You saw this where people were creating landing pages or listicles on BezFeed.

Here's the best tree houses on Airbnb. So people have been doing this for a long time. But to integrate it into the product, I think, is a really neat idea because what you're saying, is, yeah, you may have like moments where you're going to Allen Summit and you want something and Brickle is it called, the art districts, or you want something in, you know, South Beach, whatever.

But you also may sometimes just want to hit a vibe. Right. When you're scaling your startup quickly, hiring engineers can slow you down like nothing else, don't I know it? Well, here's some good news. Lemon.io will find you the perfect candidate in 48 hours. What's Lemon.io,

you ask? Well, they're a marketplace of engineers from Europe. They're going to match you with a candidate within 48 hours, and if it doesn't work out, they will replace the developer right away. They test and interview every developer to eliminate the risk of a failed project. And guess what? When you hire in a European time zone, you'll have your developers working 24-7. What a competitive advantage. So, launch portfolio founder Drew Fabricant. He said lemon.com was a game changer for his startup scout, which is a lead gen platform. Drew was under the gun to hire a developer with a very specific skill set, and lemon.io delivered a great candidate, and they were a pleasure

to work with. Not only did Drew find exactly what it was looking for, but Lemon also delivered them a second engineer just as fast. So if you could use a full-time or part-time developer to run your projects faster, go to lemon.io slash twist. That's lemon.com.i.o slash twist, and you'll receive a 15% discount for the first four weeks of work with a developer. You want to discover. It's actually, it's like the playlist, right? The Discover playlist. It's just like that. So you can, so your house first, basically, your stay first, which is great. There are these 56 categories. And then, and I love this because if you are splurging on a big trip, you may want to go to places within that trip like spring break. I went to L.A. and Palm Springs. So what it will also now do is suggest split stays, aka two different homes. It will create an itinerary for you. Like, oh, Okay, well, I see that you're going to Joshua Tree. You may also want to spend a couple nights in a yurt in Zion. So here is literally an itinerary in a box.

What I really would love down the road is because I just always need a tiny bit more, is if I could be like, I'm going to France, find me three houses in this region and have it just be like burr-b-ber. Right now it seems like it's suggesting the two upfront. Listen, I'm not mad at this. I love this feature. It's great. It's so great that it made me want more.

Well, DoorDash has like a second order feature. And when you order from DoorDash, have you had this experience where they upsell you on a double dash? Yeah, totally. So this is super. So you want some ice cream or do you want a cookie? Yeah, the whole thing's get. You ordered your Pad Thai.

I don't know why anybody would order that. Like it doesn't travel well. It's probably one more time. Yeah. I don't know. You order your salad, whatever. Details. Details.

Whatever. Details. Like a pat tie just comes in. a brick of like gelatinous goo. I've never ordered why they can. Yeah, that is, yeah. Anyway, you order your ramen, Tai Shoken style where they put the broth over here and the noodles over here.

And then it's like, would you like Boba? Now, what they're doing is, they're taking the things they know are very fast that are in walkable distance. Driver parks, get your ramen from Tai Shokin, and now they go to Boba guys or whatever and grab the boba. You're locked in.

And so this is a very cool, like, double dash kind of feature. And it's great for the hosts. Great for hosts. Spreads the love around. And it's great for the experience because it is kind of cool to experience two different styles of vacation. And it might even extend your. I mean,

to book it one click? Like, yeah. To just be a, not have to not have to search, right? Like, okay,

I know that I want to go to this region near Switzerland. And I know I want to go to another place. Yeah. There's another reason. They, I just can't believe I missed that. This is about inventory. You ever try to go.

somewhere for 10 days and they're like, yeah, you got seven days in this Palm Spring House. Yeah, but what about the weekend? They're like, yeah, somebody already snipered that. No weekend for you. What this is about is when you go on a seven to 10 day stay, they know that it's hard to find seven to 10 days in a row. So the reality might be that you then go get a hotel because they are available for

seven to 10 days. And now you can hit, you know, that one great house. I'm like, oh, yeah, then how about this year? it might not be that they want you to go to the yurt. It might be that the killer Palm Springs, you know, 1950s architecture house just isn't available for the weekend. And they just found you a way to book and solve your problem, which a lot of people do. They're like, I got this place for seven days.

Let me find another place for three days. So they just, they're solving problems. It also seems to solve a little bit of a discovery problem for hosts too. Like I would have, you know, I mean, clearly. And I'm curious to know on the back end how the hosts get to be included. Like, included. How do they get? Waitings and photos.

The super host thing probably. They are super into photos. Yeah, it's a super hosting. Your ratings matter and your photos matter. So what this also does is create a competition to get on those lists. You get yourself on that list, man. Oh, my Lord. So now everybody's looking at that saying, how do I get on the OMG category?

Because they got some weird stuff. Like I can pull up some OMGs here, but like people put a submarine in their backyard. Like a train car. Yeah. You know, you got like a windmill. Crazy wacky stuff that, you know, I want, ooh, and ski out. Well, I got that covered. Hey-oh. Well, Jake Al Dunk there. But if someone

wants to come ski with you, they might need to. Oh, my God. Molly gets an octopus tentacle. Molly gets first shot. Tully. We take care of talent. Oh, thanks, man. But your kids will get in there too. Nick and then. You could say in a windmill. Say in a windmill. Oh, my kids would love to stay in that alien thing. A little UFO saucer. Yeah, the flying saucer. There's also, and I don't know if this was on here before, but there's camping. Was there camping on Airbnb before? I think that you could rent to camping or glamping.

I think people were able to put their camping inventory on there, but there's a Hip Camp is a competitor. We had them on the pod, very smart. I tried to invest in that company. I missed it. Yeah, that's cool. I like that. I think they're obviously going to go right after Hip Camp.

Now, Hip Camp, I think, is land as well as, like, your setup, like we're seeing here. Right. So this is great. You know, people want to forest bathe, which I think is actually a thing. Like, hanging out in a forest is good for your body and soul, I think. for humans to just get out there. I know I'm starting to sound like a hippie-dipy over here, but I kind of feel that way.

No, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. I want to put a yurt on my property. I got a couple of acres here, and I was going to put on your, my wife shot that down. That's how it does work, because it's people allow for camping on their private land.

I also saw, by the way, as we were scrolling, that there are 6,500 houses available in the Arctic. I would like to do that. I want to go, I am now planning, as of this moment, a Northern Lights trip. Ooh, good call. Right.

Wait, how do you time? Northern Lights trip. I would like to know about that. Make sure you actually hit the Northern Lights. Like, how did, what if you go and there's no Northern Lights and you're just like, I'm freezing up here. But oh my God, look at the way. I mean, look at that. So beautiful. 65-5-1-drums. I mean, the one time I've been to Alaska just occurred. Like, I think it just happens more up there. But I think you can probably,

they're, they, sometimes they predict it. Oh, really? Wow, look at that. I want to stay in like a freaking glass glass like greenhouse. I love these like small homes. Yeah, I wish there was an investment where somebody could scale these small homes. We have blockable, which is doing stackable homes, but not like ADUs and this kind of stuff. And every time I look at these companies that are making the ADUs, it's very bespoke, not scalable. I need somebody who wants to make three models, but they're going to start with one for three years, then add the second one in year four, and then add the third one in year six.

But they just churn them out. Here's your glass box. And they just keep lowering the price and the efficiency of it and put it on wheels. I keep trying. I really wanted to do one of those blue homes, BLU. Like I was like, this is my jam. I'm going to buy land. And then I'm going to do this, you know, truck in the house. And they're like, you can get them off the grid. They're super cool. But it just, they fell apart.

Listen, when you start scaling quickly, your company needs to be run professionally. And Odo is the software that helps you maintain control of your fast running business. Odo suite of business apps let you run your entire company on one platform. This means you don't need to keep adding a bunch of different SaaS products. Everything you need is already on Odu. All you have to do is turn it on when you're ready. Odu has over 40 main apps and over 16,000 apps from their open source community. We're talking about sales, accounting, marketing automation, HR, website builders, and so much more.

Plus, if you only need two or three apps to optimize your workflow, that's all you will pay for. Again, Odo helps you streamline by running all your business apps on one platform. That means no more issues transferring data back and forth. you'll have one customer support contact across all your apps, not 20. And the best part, well, here's your call to action. Your first app is free forever. And Odo is offering $1,000 credit on your first implementation pack. Go to Odu.com slash twist for $1,000 off.

That's ODO.O.com slash twist. And then the other thing, there was one more announcement in this Airbnb reveal, which is actually a really big deal for travelers, which is this thing called air cover, which they're calling the most comprehensive set of protections free. protections in travel. So you know, you book something and they always want you to spend $70 a person on insurance or this or that. And the air cover, uh, if I recall correctly is like, if you need to, if your host cancels on you, they'll find you a new place. Do we have that? Can we pull that up

the video? I mean, we were air being host for a while and we had to cancel on people, as is you're right as the host. And, um, sometimes it was kind of a bummer, but we'd have family in town. We had this extra house that we were planning on selling, but we're Airbnb. being while we were selling it and, you know, we'd have to cancel some stuff. And I, you know, so here we go. So, booking protection guarantee if the host has to cancel within a month of arrival, you get your money back. Check in guarantee if you can't get in to your Airbnb, then I don't know.

I guess they take care of that for you. If you find that it's not what it was supposed to be, they'll take care of it and rebook you. They'll find you a similar or better home or refund you. Perfect. And that's like, and then this 24 hour safety line and all of this. stuff, but the fact that this is all included, because that is one of the big knocks on Airbnb is like rolling the dice. You feel you are rolling the dice a little.

It's a leap of faith that you're going to show up and it's going to be what you thought was. You have to be an adventure traveler. Like that's what, but now when the network hits still, Molly, you know, at this point, when you see 50 or 100 reviews, you kind of get that sense like it can't be fake. And you know, they all know the tricks. Like you go for the super host and you read the. reviews and you look for the one bad review and then you look up on Google satellite view so you can tell where it actually is.

Oh, the satellite view wasn't part of my little kit there. I'm going to add that. Oh, yeah. That's a good one. Yeah. Because you don't want to find out that it's like in an apartment building that's all under construction, which did happen to me once in Palm Springs. And that's when I added satellite.

But like I definitely go to the worst reviews and work backwards. And the worst reviews are always like, ah, you know, it's always something stupid. You know, they're just like, the bandwidth was, you know, whatever. And I'm like, okay, well, you know, you know, You know, it's always something. Like, I asked for a late checkout. They didn't give it to me F you. You know, and you're like, but what about the rest?

I look at the worst one and see if that's something I care about. Like in a restaurant, if it's food poisoning. No, thank you. Sure, sure. No, but I always tell people like that the reason why so many things are 3.5 stars on Yelp is like anytime a system gets to scale, you have people using reviews as customer support. My feeling is reviews should not be allowed to use as customer support. When it's a customer support thing,

somebody should flag it as customer support, like say the restaurant owner. This was a customer support issue. It should move to a tab that says customer support issues and how they were resolved, not reviews. So if you're at Yelp and you're a product manager, Jeremy Stompleman, everybody, somebody clip this and send it to Jeremy.

It's a free idea from J-Cal. I'm sure you've had it. But I want two tabs, customer support issues, reviews. If somebody's review is really customer support, like they sat us 40 minutes late, or they forgot our dessert, whatever, then put that under customer support and then look at the unresolved tickets and resolve tickets

and then have the person rate customer support. Because bad things happen at restaurants, right? Bad things happen in hotels, whatever. It's how the person replies to it. So if they forgot your dessert or they forgot your salad and then they said they gave us free dessert, you might be like five stars for customers. customer support.

I don't judge customer support by the mistake. I judge it by the response. Yes. Which is also how I manage people. So you don't judge the people by the mistake? You judge them based on how they respond to the mistake or attempt to remedy it. Correct. Correct. I mean, mistakes.

I mean, I make mistakes all the time. If I make a mistake, I'm like, oh, man, what's the lesson here? How do I avoid it in the future? And how do I make up for it? I think that's the right way to judge people. So I think, can you take the note? can you improve from here? Are you self-aware?

Are you defensive? You know, I mean, it's fine to be defensive sometimes, but at first you, if you're in a service-based industry, which almost all of us are to a certain extent, like we all have bosses. You know, I have LPs, right? We have LPs. We have people in the syndicate who are LPs.

Like if we screw up the K-1s, which has always been a challenge for every investment firm, K-1s just trickle in from companies, we just have to fall on the sword. Hey, we got to do better. If you're going to be an angel investor, We highly recommend filing an extension proactively. And every year we're going to get better at this.

And we're going to improve the process. But this has been like, this is in the weeds. But like the one thing I've had to, you know, I had to deal with. This is like the tax form that you have to send to angel investors so that they can. Yes, they're in a company. Some companies don't file a K1 because they don't need to, for my understanding, if there was no profit or whatever. But so when you're in a partnership, you have to file a K1.

Okay, you get 300. You got 100 investments. You got like maybe 50K1s coming in every year. All of a sudden, your tax returns start to look crazy, which is why like some rich person, you know, Trump or whatever's tax returns got thicker and thicker and thicker because they might have so many different investments. And then I know rich people who say, I'm just not investing in venture funds. I'm not investing in companies anymore because I just want my taxes to be simple. They literally are like, wow. I'm just putting my money into like a stock index because I just don't want to deal with all this

craziness and mischigana out there. But, you know, I want to just point out the great leadership at Airbnb, Joe and Brian and the whole team over there done a great job because there's chaos in the markets. And what are they doing? They're shipping features. And this is a lesson for you all out there. How did Brian and Joe make such a juggernaut here? I've got this, a third founder of his name.

How did they build this relentless focus on their customers and product? Just stay focused on your customers. Stay focused on your product. It's all going to work out. fine. Here we are in a market crash, complete utter chaos, blood in the streets, and what's our top story? You're just like, you know what?

I want to go to a castle. Nathan. I'm sorry, Nathan for forgetting. There were three founders, Nathan, Joe, and Brian, of course. So congratulations. Just keep shipping product. These are great. And you'll be fine. And Airbnb is up a little bit today. So congrats.

In a market that's pure chaos, they're up. I would still love a home swap because apparently I like Hamilton can never be satisfied. But I will say these features are cool. I watched the whole video. I was like, and I found myself saying out loud, oh, that's awesome. Oh, that's super cool.

Oh, wow. This is the approach I'm taking here on this podcast. I take it with our investments and, you know, the programs we run for founders. You see Founder University, the Climate Syndicate. We're just constantly thinking, like, how do we ship some features? I'm doing that inside, right? So, yeah.

And then wait. Is there also something about ad revenue? I know, Nick does keep saying ad revenue. I forgot about the ad revenue. So I guess are they letting people. So someone asked the question, I guess. They've never had ad revenue before. And now they have a completely curated place to have it.

Turner Novak had a good tweet about it yesterday. Okay. They have a curious place to have it if they wanted to. Well, here's what Turner says. How much ad revenue can Airbnb generate charging host to boost their listings in the feed? So let's say you wanted to be a feature listing. So if you go on, Yelp. You go on Redfin or Zillow, you go on Amazon.

You do a search. What happens, Molly? They copied Google and they have a feature listing. You ever see the sort on Redfin or Zillow is like for you or something? Yep. Or like the default sort on Amazon, whatever. They make this kind of weird sort that you can change to distance, to rating, whatever your jam is, you know, cost, number of bedroom square footage. That becomes an incredible revenue generator because people have stopped searching for product.

on Google. Where do they search for products? Amazon. Where do you search for a restaurant? Yelp. So, where do you search for a place to stay? Airbnb. So if you have a lot of searches, where do you search for apps? Not on Google. You search for apps on the App Store. In the App Store, Apple has premium listings, clearly labeled. Yelp, I would say somewhat clearly labeled. Do you think everybody knows those are ads? No. Maybe half people do. I think eventually get there, yeah. Only like a third of people know what the ads are on Google, by the way. That's been the biggest scam in history. The FTC should come down on that.

Remember, they used to be a different color and then now it's like there's a little ad button. You cannot tell the ads on Google. Yeah. And I prove that, by the way. You know, I did a little study on that. I will say this would be very tricky for Airbnb to implement. In terms of host relations, like the one thing I think that has been rocky, and I know this from someone who used to work there,

the one thing that has been consistently rocky for Airbnb is host relationships, like the relationships with the people who list their houses on the service. Why? And so if they just, I think sometimes they felt like the afterthought, like they felt like they weren't necessarily the ones that were being taken care of when it came to someone trashing their house or, you know, insurance for that. I actually had that experience, yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I think it's, I think it is improved, but they don't know, like the hosts felt really screwed by the, some of the pandemic response, right? which in which Airbnb, rightfully, was like, we will let you cancel anything.

You can cancel any booking. And then the hosts were like, oh, well, that's all my revenue, right? So then there's been a little bit attention there.

And I think if Airbnb were to, and we have no indication that they are, but if they were to let hosts pay for that premium placement, I feel like that could be politically a little tricky. It could be. You know, and it depends on how it's executed.

You know, if you're searching for, for Palm Springs and it says, you know, on the right hand column or the fifth list is like, you know, it says promoted. Promoted. You know, maybe you'll be okay with it. But I don't think they need to. You know, the marketplace functions so well.

I don't think they need to do it. I don't think so either. Amazon, it's a bit of a game for them because how many times have you searched on Amazon? And there's an ad at the top of Amazon. So just go ahead and do a search right now and show everybody if you're like, do a search for iPhone 13 battery. pack. And when you do an iPhone, you know, MagSafe battery pack on Amazon, whatever the choice is, like the best choice, sometimes they advertise as well. And they also have the most reviews. So if you pay for that advertising, you get more exposure, the people who can afford to pay for

advertising tend to be the people with the great products. And so the best seller or Amazon choice or Amazon itself, which is like Amazon's choice. Sometimes Amazon's choice. is Amazon, go figure. But like, you know, they'll put like a bestseller note on it. And the first three are always like the paid ones. And then you go down, it's like sponsored. And then sometimes you'll see here like there's the, what they call that, Amazon choice, the white one there.

The Macsave battery pack from Apple is the Amazon choice. What you'll see is like sometimes those will be the ones that are actually buying the sponsorship. So there is an idea that SEM leads to SEO. Search engine marketing, buying ads on Google. search would then get more people to visit your site, which would then impact the algorithm, because you would have more people going to your site. You would have more traffic. You would have more links. So that's the name of the game here. And it's a little bit incestuous, right?

I'm paying you. And that doesn't move me up in the rankings directly, but it does lead to more reviews, which then would move me up in the ranking. So if you and I had the best MagSafe battery charger for iPhones, Molly, and you spent a million dollars on ads a year, and I didn't, Well, you're just going to sell more. And if all things being equal for both four and a half star battery packs, you're going to get higher rankings because you'll get more reviews because you sell more. And it's kind of fate complete. All right.

So congratulations to them. If you are a startup, you know you have to save money wherever you can. Actually, you have to save time, money, and bandwidth. All of that is why we love Coda. Coda is one doc to rule them all. In Coda, your text and your tables can live together, coexist like cats and dogs in the same dock, which means all your valuable data,

objectives and strategies are all in one place. Nothing gets lost, and your team is literally on the same page. Kota works out of the box and it's totally customizable. You can create a wiki for your team, onboard new hires from anywhere, and of course, react quickly to any changes in your business because you just update the page.

And there are templates for basically anything that you can duplicate and start using today. Check this out. Our guy, Presh, just made a very, beautiful template for our investor updates that you can go and duplicate right now at this week in startups.com slash investor updates. We're already making you more productive. Join the productivity revolution and sign up for Coda today. Head to coda.io slash twist to sign up and get a thousand dollar credit. That's Codda.io slash twist for a thousand dollars off.

All right. In other news, Coinbase released not only their results, but they released a filing that has sent some people into a panic, perhaps unnecessarily. Stock is down another 22%. This is pretty crazy. Coinbase market cap is now just above $12 billion. I'm not sure how much cash they have. It is, I think that's at the bottom. Their total cash is $6.1 billion. So they have $6.1 billion. 14% or $1 billion from last year, so their cash on hand is down to billy. So if they have $6 billion and they're worth 12,

the enterprise value is $6 billion for this company, which is just phenomenal in terms of how crushed they've been. For reference, last time Coinbase was worth under $10 billion was in 2018, when they raised a Series E at an $8 billion valuation. Crypto is coming apart. But maybe you could explain this nuanced issue of, And again, with crypto, as we saw yesterday with the Luna, Terra, a lot of the stuff going on here, God bless you if that was a sneeze. And if that was like a sub-tweet, where you're like, oh, no, no, no, no.

That was just half and half. I thought you were like, a scam. When I said Tara, you were, oh, b-boh. God bless you, Molly. Oh, pardon me. Oh, how rude. Sorry. Oh, so rude to me.

When reasonably intelligent people who work as capital allocator as a journalist in finance, can't understand what's going on, maybe a red flag. I mean, I'm not saying there aren't financial instruments in the world that I don't understand and that I'm some chessmaster here. But Molly worked at the marketplace. I've invested in 300 companies and put over $100 million to work. I think we're reasonably sophisticated, financially literate individuals

who work in the field. And we can't understand some of these, you know, grifts, algorithmic stable coins. Somebody's lending 25,000 Bitcoins, and then somebody's pegged to a dog. I mean, nobody can figure this out

what exactly is happening. And then if you ask a question, people are like, oh, you're dumb, you don't get it. Yeah, that's adorable, by the way. Everybody who's like, you're dumb, you don't get it. We're doing this for, you, dumb dumb. Someone out there doesn't get it.

We're trying to help this. We're trying to explain this so that somebody either can make money or doesn't lose all their money. Like, we're the conduit for the dumb questions. That's our whole entire job. I mean, credit to fault swaps in the 2008 era, like a lot of people didn't understand what you were doing. Like, why are you putting all these mortgages together in one bucket?

Like, should these people have mortgages and which mortgages and you're swapping them with each other and one person shorting them? Like, why are you doing all this? Like, isn't like a mortgage enough? like or like a collection of mortgages? Why do you have to carve out the subprime ones? And then why do you got to create derivatives? It's just like when it ever gets too complex,

somebody's angle shooting is what I've done. I totally agree. So one of my favorite, I'll tell the story quickly, but one of my favorite journalism stories of all time, which I told in the founder you session the other day is the story of Bethany McLean, who is, was a fortune,

a writer for Fortune magazine in 2001. She was at a Enron shareholders meeting. And she was like, hey, how do you guys make money? Like, she's so dumb, lady. And everyone was like, you're an idiot. Finance lady journalist is so dumb.

And then she ended up writing a fortune cover story that was like, no one can explain how Enron makes money. Not Enron, not anybody else. And that was the beginning of the unraveling of Enron because this woman steeled herself to the trolls and was like, there's just one thing I don't understand here. Yeah. And that's how you make any money?

at all. Yeah. How does your register money go on to the register? Do you have a register? Does a bank account? Does money come into it that you get to keep some amount of? Who pays you? So anyway.

Explain the, I guess this is about if Coinbase were to go bankrupt, which at a time like this, okay, that's unrealistic. Let's be honest here. They have $6 billion in cash. But people were reading into this, I think, like, wait a second. Why are they making this note? Why are you saying this exactly? So, so let's go through it.

Part of a regulatory filing, basically, Coinbase released some, a filing that basically said, here's what could happen if we went bankrupt. Here's what would happen to your tokens if we were to go bankrupt. And basically said that customer tokens could be used as collateral. And Twitter user Nick Winkler at the Winkler Group says he's an on-demand-d due diligence platform is what he calls himself. Okay. I like it.

So broke this down a little bit and said, you know, there's this new language and this 10Q warning crypto investors, what might happen to the coins. 10Q being a quarterly report for people to know. One is when you're filing to go public. 10 Q is when you're doing your quarterly. So they put notes in here. Yep. And he said, quoting from this report, quote, moreover, because custodially held crypto

assets may be considered to be the property of a bankruptcy estate in the event of a bankruptcy, the crypto assets we hold in custody on behalf of our customers could be subject to bankruptcy proceedings. Okay. That makes sense. Such customers could be treated as our general unsecured creditors. Okay. So if you know anything about bankruptcy law.

Yeah. You know that they go to the back of the line. Yeah. Okay. So because crypto is not money and it's not a bank account, I guess, I'm reading into this. the, if they went bankrupt, a bankruptcy judge would look at the assets. They'd say these Luna tokens, this Ethereum, this Bitcoin, whatever's in there, Doge, is now part of the value here.

And if they had, let's say, I don't know, a $20 billion loan from JP Morgan, like in, we, we crashed, right? Yeah. They had this big line of credit. They could call that line. there's only $10 billion worth of assets. It's the Doge coin in people's wallets. JP Morgan's the senior creditor, I guess.

They are first to go out, Molly, right? Am I correct here? So they would get their money first, which I guess they're saying that that would be your Doge and your Doge account. Because it's not FDIC insured. Exactly. Like if you were a bank, if you had your money in a bank and, well, if you had your money in a bank and a bank went bankrupt,

you would be FDIC insured. and you could go through some long process to get your money back. In this case, they're saying there's no insurance. This stuff is digital. And if Coinbase were to go bankrupt, it would just be considered part of the basket of assets. And the people who have a right to those assets would go way to the back of the line. And if there was any money left after all of these sort of more higher tier creditors got paid,

then you might get your coin back. So it freaked everybody the hell out. And I guess a Twitter user was like, well, listen, they got $7 billion on their balance sheet, which we just confirmed is maybe $6 billion change. And this brave new world, world, W-O-H-R-L-E-D, said they are re-hypothicating. Rehypothicating, which is a word we learned yesterday. Yes. Thank God, just in time. So if we pull up Investopedia, which does a really good job at this.

They're so good. What is rehypovocation? Rehypithocation is the practice whereby banks and brokers use for their own purposes, assets that have been posted as collateral by their clients, clients who permit rehypothication. Rehypothication. Rehypothication of their collateral may be compensated either through a lower cost or borrowing or rebate on fees.

In other words, like you loan out your Uber or Google shares for somebody to short them, right? That would be like, I think the canonical example here, if I'm going to use a fancy word, the best example. Or even, I mean, I think when it gets out of hand, it becomes similar actually to packaging up mortgages and reselling them as securities. So this could be a good thing, a bad thing. Right. It can be a bad thing when it gets like resold and resold and resold. Right.

When it turns into the mortgage swaps. Yeah. It is a very common thing for banks to do, which is you sell, you know, in this case, they're saying Coinbase is selling more Bitcoin than it actually holds and thereby acting like a fractional reserve bank. And so the theory that this Twitter user is putting forth about how Coinbase could go bankrupt is in the instance where there was a bank run. If everybody took their Bitcoin off exchanges, then Coinbase could be bankrupt because they would actually owe more Bitcoin to everybody than they have in reserve. So in a contagion, like we saw with margin loans, I suppose here, if you're hypothicating

Bitcoin like a margin loan would it be called Molly and you'd have to cover it in some ways because that's what they're saying. I'm reading on the Investopedia here that this was a common practice in 2007 but hedge funds became much more wary about it in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse

and subsequent credit crunch of 2008-2009. So this is where those controls start to get put in place, right? Yep. And this is just what, you know, interestingly, like we said yesterday, I'm so relieved that we did that interview yesterday because so much more of this makes a little more sense now. And also points to a thing that we were saying,

which is that so much of what's happening in crypto, like once you start creating exchanges, you start financializing these assets in all of the same old ways that banks do. And then you probably start to make riskier and riskier bets in all of the same old ways that like banks and the Fed always do. And you could find yourself. And again, it's still hypothetical.

But you could find yourself in a situation where there's a run on your Bitcoin and you don't have enough in reserve to pay back. And this is why a lot of the early true believers in Bitcoin say, don't let somebody custodian your Bitcoin, get it out of there. And in fact, I was on, you know, all the real stuff is happening not on Twitter now, but people are moving their conversations to the group chats. Yep. And so I'm on a group chat with a bunch of people.

Some of them are crypto folks. And somebody said, I'm pulling all my Bitcoin out of Coinbase. Oh, really? And I'm going to put it on a cold storage because I was going to do that anyway. I mean, somebody with significant. I would dare say eight or nine figures of Bitcoin that they just have sitting over there.

Now, they don't want to sell their Bitcoin, but just on the news of this, the speculation of this, and what's happening in the broader market means people are going to essentially create a run on the bank. In other words, they move stuff out. So the re-hype, apothecation. Hypothecation, thank you. My dyslexia is going crazy.

This was an Indian name. I have never heard that word in my life until yesterday. And now it turns out it's the center of everything. I love a timing. I do. I mean, I love adding a new word. Rehypothecation.

Rehypothication. Rehypothication. Rehypothication. The fact that you know somebody who is considering taking that much Bitcoin off in exchange is exactly the potential start of the worst case scenario. So let's look at what Brian Armstrong immediately tweeted in response. Like, whoa,

Which sounds a little, you know, like we've heard this story before. Your funds are safe at Coinbase just as they've always been, he says. That's the TLDR. Okay. And then he went on to explain this in multiple tweets. Okay. We have no risk of bankruptcy, he wrote. However, we included a new risk factor based on an SEC requirement called SAB 121.

Oh, the SOB 121. Sob 121, which is a newly, I don't know either. But I like how you call it sob because it makes it sound like you totally know. Yeah. Which is a newly required disclosure for public companies that hold crypto assets for third parties. So this is part of new SEC regulations. It's coming. Okay.

We believe our prime and custody customers have strong legal protections in their terms of service that protects their assets, even in a black swan event like this. Okay. So let's parse this because he's saying there's a tier of customers who are going to be at the front of the bankruptcy court line. Got it. For the rest of the chumps. for our retail customers, he writes, we're taking further steps to update our user terms such that we offer the same protections

to those customers in a Black Swan event. We should have had these in place previously, so let me apologize for that. Okay. So that's good. Okay, so I think what this means is they have people who pay them to custodian their coins, and they are paying a fee.

So if you own, if you were like a treasury, Like, remember when Tesla bought a bunch of Bitcoin? I don't know if they use Coinbase or not. Somebody can look that up. But a lot of times people who have treasuries, they will pay a custodian fee. I think it's like 50 basis points are 1%. So if you have a billion dollars over there, you pay them $10 million a year or maybe $5 million a year to make sure your coins are safe.

And they are the custodians of them in some abstract way that, like, they're not assets of Coinbase. watching them in a, I'm going to use an analogy here that's imperfect, but a safety deposit box. So if the bank goes under and your diamonds are in a safety deposit box, no reasonable judge is going to be like, oh, well, that's an asset of the bank. No, they were charging you to store them here. It's not like it's they were, you know, there. So I think it's kind of that kind of situation. And then maybe the retail customers didn't fall into that because they're not paying for it, right? I don't think retail customers pay a fee to be to be, to be.

custodians and get all these extra things. It's sort of like when you get free software, you pay for Gmail, if somebody hacks your Gmail and deletes it all, which people have been doing, that's like one of these great Bitcoin hacks. A friend of mine, they deleted all his Gmail and then said, hey, if you want your Gmail back, pay us like a hundred bucks kind of situation. And you call Google, there's no phone number to call. Now, if you were using Google Docs, they would have backups for you, no problem, or restore it. You're paying us $50 per user per year, $100 per user per year. That's our delight to go restore your email account for you. That's but you're paying for service.

So in a free service, maybe they don't offer that kind of stuff. So it's two-churchs of service. That would be like, that's me, right? Like, so I have my tiny little, you know, I was like,

I will risk $1,000 on this. I'll put $1,000 on black, sir. I have my teeny tiny little portfolio on Coinbase. I don't pay anything to Coinbase. I just went and I bought, you know, some various little diversified portfolio of coins and it lives there. And so I'm exactly.

Would you pay 10 bucks a year to have, would you pay one base, point to have like this kind of backup service like where it's really strong and you get better VIP you pick up they'll pick up the phone on the first ring type situation 24 hours a day. I bank with a bank that does that and includes FDIC and you know. So like the question is is Coinbase a bank? Like fundamentally we're going to be starting to ask this question more and more and more. And this is why.

And if it's doing all the same financialization, if it's loaning out more tokens than it, you know, owns. Exactly. I'm getting a real quack quack, quack feeling. here. I think they want that. I'll be totally honest. I think the right now, given the state of crypto, crypto is in full free fall right now. Nobody trusts it. If this Luna thing goes belly up, if Tether starts to

shake, I saw some rumblings on Twitter about Tether, maybe they're going to depag, you know, and then USDT did and Luna depagged or broke their peg. I don't know. And there might be well, depegged and then there might be a lot of like institutional investment behind it, trying to prop it up. I'm not making any more pegging jokes. I'm just making that clear here that we know. I used to peg my pants in the 80s.

Yes. I don't know what that means either. I don't want to. What? No, that was when you would. Do you fold and twist and then you get the little like the little rolls? Oh, I did that too.

Sure, of course. And I had my penny loafers. Yeah, I didn't call it pegging, but, uh, or I didn't peg them. But I had, um, I had my penny loafers, which I would put two New York City subway topings into. And then if I was running for the, train, I would take them out of my penny loafers like I was a superhero. Like I was Spider-Man, Peter Parker, running for the train.

I'd lift my shoe up, grab the token out of it, boom. Oh, sometimes I just hopped the term. So I just took my horse. There you go. It's kidding. Like our childhoods were so freaking different. I know, I know. It's like a country girl and city boy.

Could they make a podcast work? Somebody's going to make like Henry Bellcaster's making a video now. All right. Oh my goodness. All right. Crypto people? need regulation today. ASAP, they want it because this is going to

be a really challenging time for them because I think retail investors, just like they don't trust the stock market right now and they're feeling like, do I want to trade stocks? Maybe these things are all a scam, blah, blah, exactly what happened after the dot-com bus. Guess what?

That's how people are going to start. That's how people already feel about crypto. I have already, the reason I put $1,000 total into crypto is I've already been through this story once. Remember my story about the 300 Bitcoin that I bought at $1 each? Yeah, exactly. Using an exchange called Mount Gawks and a middleman named called Dwalah. Good luck.

Both of which got hacked and all of that disappeared in the ether. I know how this is it. I am going to excuse myself, Molly. I have to go to Miami. Yes, you do, sir. For everybody who's asking, we are going to release all the episodes, all of the talks as episodes on the all in feed in real time. I'm producer Nick.

Make sure you have your squad ready to go. Not in real time. Impossible to do it real time. Well, I should say shortly after. As soon as they're ready. And I say as soon as they're ready, like the day after the next day. So if there's 15, if there's 15 of these, you know, maybe over the next seven days to a day would be great for me. And then the YouTube, the audio will be out quickly.

Yes. The video will take a week or so because the files are so huge that it takes a while to transfer. So hopefully the all-in stream goes right to the top. We're trying to goose it. So we just have all 14 talks come. And, you know, like for the press and everybody who wants to come, like, we're just going to, you know, have it. We don't have room.

I took the money instead of giving you seats. That's it. You can, you get the, it's, I sold the tickets to the fans for 500 bucks each and to the capital allocators and CEOs for $7,500 a piece. So sorry to the press, but if I left 50 of you and that would have cost me like half a Millie. It would cost me $300,000. Like, you just, you can listen to the audio feed.

All right. Go get your flight. That's it. That's my feeling at this point. I'm done. I'm taking the cash. Yeah, good for you. Molly,

you have, number one, you have the helm. Hi, I, Captain. You have the helm. Who is that? Who is that? Picard to, Safe travels.

Picard to number one. Riker. Riker. Riker was number one, right? All right, right. All right, Riker, you have the helm. I'm going to go get some Earl Grate tea. Onward.

See you all later. Onward, boss. See you in Miami. Yes, ma'am. Definitely do that. Definitely do that. All right. Goodbye, everybody.

Ashley Carmen, thanks for coming back to talk about Facebook dropping podcasts, which was your scoop. And led, I think, more than one of us to say, wait, Facebook had podcasts? What did I miss? A lot of them didn't know about this. Apparently not. When did this, like, give us the background on Facebook podcasts. Yeah.

So last year, Mark Zuckerberg announced a bunch of different audio initiatives, including maybe you remember like Soundbytes, which was like the short form audio. They wanted to launch kind of like the TikTok of audio, live audio rooms, which was their clubhouse competitor that kind of got the most attention. They launched an audio hub. And then they launched podcasts on the platform, which is not like a podcast network where they're spending money to buy podcasts, but more if you have an RSS feed, you can distribute it through Facebook and people will be able to listen to your show through Facebook.

So they discontinued pretty much all of that except for live audio rooms, which they're just folding into Facebook Live. And that was the news. And that came basically a year after the announcements. Got it. And do we think that that was partly because no one knew it was there or that people didn't necessarily want to consume audio through Facebook? So it's pretty funny because prior to them shutting it down, I actually published

a story maybe like two weeks before talking about how they seem to be pulling out of the space, primarily because from what I heard, they were focusing on other priorities. So like reels and the metaverse, shopping. So I think my best guess would be that, you know, those just took precedence. We've seen some other reporting to suggest that. And I would imagine that audio was kind of like a long-term bet that maybe just wasn't paying off immediately. Right. So really it was maybe just a business discipline thing. You have to really, if you're going to, you know, like Spotify, building its podcast business has involved a pretty massive investment up to and including exclusives and paying $100 million for talent. Exactly. So I think, you know, you can build a podcast

player. They did. I, I am curious, you know, why they didn't want to just keep the player line. It's just like supporting RSS feeds that already exist. But, you know, I think they just put people on a different resource, one of different resources. Yeah. Well, then, let's talk about the podcasting space getting more and more competitive because last time we were here, you shared your theory that Spotify is gearing up to go head to head with YouTube.

YouTube since then, like side note behind the scenes, has reached out to us to see how they can better support us as podcasters, not just video. Spotify's team is doing follow-ups as well? Like, is this the fight that YouTube didn't necessarily see coming? I don't know if they didn't see it.

But at the same time, they've had podcasters on YouTube forever. And so I think they just kind of like had that and they were happy with it. And then maybe they recognized like, oh, if we just fold audio only into this as well, maybe there's an opportunity here. So I think they kind of just didn't seize that and really probably saw the tells us as a video platform first. So I don't know if they, I doubt they first saw Spotify coming for them necessarily. But I also just don't know how well Spotify's video product is really going over. I'd be curious.

Like, I always say you and I need to chat off the podcast. I know I really do. I need to get your email. We really do. We'll just, we'll make that happen. We'll definitely make that happen. You also wrote about Spotify's podcasting architect leaving. What are you hearing about what's happening there?

Yeah. So Courtney Holt left. And since then, most basically there's been like three prominent departures from Spotify. There's been Courtney Holt who left. He kind of like, yeah, helped spearhead Spotify's and hire podcast apparatus. Lydia Pull Green left from Gimlet. She was top of...

Back to the New York Times. Yeah, she went back to times. It sounds like a great gig. Makes sense. And then Mike McNano, who started the app anchor, he is also leaving as well. So it seems like there's some big names leaving. It's tough to say, whether it's something where it's like,

well, they bought these companies. Phase one of Spotify's podcast efforts is kind of over. They're entering now, like, proving out the model versus like entering the space. or if it's just like, well, you know, the options vested, the contracts ended, people want to do new things. It's tough to say, I am very curious who they bring in and kind of how they restructure the teams there. I know. I wonder, I mean, that hire is going to tell us a lot about whether Spotify plans to continue with an audio first play or really go hard for YouTube in that video space, right? They have to do audio first.

I think so, too. And it sort of feels like what YouTube is trying to do is say, like, We've already dominated you in video. We're going to try to dominate you in audio. And so Spotify should probably stick to those guns because there's no universe in which they're going to come for YouTube on video. Yeah. It's just going to require a lot of different backend work. As you know, like manually updating a video to Spotify and YouTube and doing your audio as well and checking your stats and your analytics across platforms. It just becomes this really big endeavor that I think unless you can prove the audience is there, specifically the video on Spotify,

might be a tougher sell. I literally see producer tears in our chat right now. They're like, yeah, we know this all too well. Yeah. Well, I wonder to how much some of this shuffling and maybe like an increased focus on video because Spotify does seem to be sending signals that it wants to be like a media company is about this painful fact that I feel like I've had to confront since 2005 when I started podcasting, which is like, doesn't make that much money.

Like, has anybody figured out how to make it? actual money in podcasting other than be an IP studio for Hulu? I don't even know if that necessarily pays the bills. I mean, it's nice money to have. I'm skeptical that can support an entire company. But yeah, I mean, that's the big question. So since we last chatted, Spotify recently had its earnings, its stock reached the lowest levels it's ever been.

And a lot of that had to do with investors, just not believing that this strategy was working out. The big thing they have to pull off is really monetizing the long tail of podcasters. So getting the smaller anchor creators, maybe shows that are not anchor but are just like, you know, smaller size, be able to monetize those in addition to the big whales like Joe Rogan. They really want to take over the ads business. So until they can prove out that that ad world is working, then yeah, I don't know how easily they're going to make money in the space. is it we talk a lot about the the kind of the standards situation and the idea that spotify in order to be successful will probably have to break podcasting right like there isn't any way to build a more full featured ad product that I know of without making your own distribution standard right yeah they come farther than I thought they definitely promote their streaming platform and yeah So they definitely want you to be streaming and not downloading.

That's like a big change. I would say there seem to be more open about doing windowed content. I think Daniel Lath mentioned that on one of the earnings calls earlier this year. So I don't think they're doing the full exclusive strategy. And then we talked about this last time as well, but just as a state of the competition, how is Dark Horse Amazon doing? It seems like they are actually really creeping up in usage.

Yeah, it's tough to say. They don't share a ton of metrics. Amazon music, obviously you can access it through Prime, so they don't typically share much data about that. But what is this tweet from? Come on, guys. Oh, this is because I said Amazon was buying, Amazon's been buying ads apparently for the All-in Pod. Targeting against, interesting.

Like targeting against this specific podcast. So they are getting aggressive, it seems like, and getting people to want to come and listen. Yeah, they're doing their best. I mean, they have one very end up on. Jason. They haven't been making as much noise as Spotify, but they definitely made some acquisitions in the space. They launched as live social audio app called AMP. So they're making audio moves.

And their former head of podcast at Amazon Music told me that they viewed this on a decade-long business plan. So it seems like they're pretty committed to the space. Which anytime Amazon comes into your space with a long play, they can outspend you, right? I feel like even if you're Spotify. No one's worried about that. No one's, yeah. Amazon is going to outspend you and we'll see. So what do you think?

Okay, who else, though? You've also done some reporting. Like, who else is sneaking into podcasting? You reported that Substack poached one of Patreon's top podcast execs. So, like, how many people, is this the pivot to podcasts? I think it's basically that these, all these various creator platforms see subscription as an opportunity in podcasting. And they see like the fervent fan base that podcasts have. and so they're really trying to go out there.

And I mean, there's only so many that have that fervent fan base. So I think they're really trying to find the ones that do and maybe take them over to their platform. So substax case, they've poached some Patreon creators. I'm sure there's other creator platforms out there that are looking to do the same, either from creators who are like on YouTube and maybe bring their exclusive videos to their platform or something like that. So I am sure they're out there.

But really, it's like a creator play. Interesting. Are there enough? I know there are a lot of creators. how are we feeling about talent? Yeah, I mean, I think there's enough. I think it's just tricky because, as you probably know, like podcast marketing is really difficult.

It's not as easy as, I mean, all marketing is difficult. It's hard to get people to take action on something, but really it's hard to get action to get people to listen to a show. And there's not a great way to really algorithmically promote something. So that's where YouTube could be interesting too. It could be, right? Because it also has the infrastructure to incubate. and train talent.

Because it seems like the Spotify model in some ways has been not so much to like grow new podcasters, like plant a whole new garden. It's been to say, oh, you already like these people. Listen to them here instead. And there is a difference in the platform approaches. Like grow a whole bunch of new seedlings or just like plant an already established tree. And we don't know yet. It seems like which I guess we'll know in five years.

I don't know, which of those models is more effective. Totally. Yeah. When in doubt, double down on celebs seems to be the business planning. Yeah, the siblings are busy. They got stuff to do. Yeah. That's true.

That's true. And they don't, they don't always draw like you think. I mean, I think exclusivity is not the be all and all as some of these platforms are discovering. Yeah. Well, what do you think? Like, we're going to just do sort of regular predictions. As you see right now, Spotify is struggling. YouTube coming in hard,

Amazon, slow and steady and dangerous, and then this kind of other rag tag collection of podcast pivoters. Do you have some winners in mind? I don't have winners necessarily. I do think there's enough to go around, especially when you're a platform like Amazon where you don't need this to totally make your business. But it could be like a nice little cherry on top

or it could do some marketing work for you in your shows or something. I'm very curious about Spotify. I think that they've made some aggressive moves to, as an example, acquire companies, I think that's the last time I was on, acquire companies in the ad attribution space. And I feel like I actually published a little story about this, about the industry isn't just like taking that sitting down. They're actually starting to really build their party competitors for attribution. And I think that they're moving pretty quickly.

So that has been like a surprising twist to me just because I think we're seeing platforms try to dominate. And then the industry being like, actually, we really don't want you to do that. And I'm curious how plays like that will actually end up potentially hurting them. Right. Nobody ultimately wants the silos and the exclusivity, even though that might long term be the only way to make any real money here.

It's such an interesting trap to be in. And then when you look at Spotify's moves to become sort of a bigger, overarching media company, are there any warning signs in, let's say, Netflix? Um, subscription money is tough. Yeah, subscription money is tough. I think,

you know, I don't, yeah, I mean, I think it's going to be tricky. I think getting people to pay, if they can get the global audience down, I think it's audio is a place where they could succeed.

There's not that many people fully dedicated to it. It's just a matter of like, can you get people to pay for your subscription revenue? Can you get them to listen to the ads and not skip? Can you bring advertisers in from around the world? can you continue to thrive in different markets? That's really going to be it. And can you make hit podcast in case, you know,

you can't pin it all with Joe Rogan. Like, if he leaves, what happens then? Yeah. I'm glad I'm not in this business. Bloomberg's Ashley Carmen covering. I am going to get your email because you are in this business. I mean, our producer, it's on my Twitter bio. It's literally like, yeah, it's just right there.

Just email me. Yeah. Okay. All right, awesome. I will see you in my inbox. And then we'll see you next time. Thank you.