This Week in Startups - Ask an Angel PLUS Antonio Garcia Martinez vs. Apple with Zach Coelius | E1215

Episode Date: May 15, 2021

Zach Coelius joins Jason to answer live listener questions (1:09), and then the pair discuss Apple's recent debacle in firing Antonio Garcia Martinez after being pressured by employees (42:43). Check out the pod notes here: https://bitly.com/e1215notes

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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 Odo is offering $1,000 off your first implement. commentation pack at Odo.com slash twist. That's ODO.O.com slash twist. All right, with me again for Ask an Angel is my pal, Zach Collius. And we're going to do a series of questions from the audience. If you would like to ask us a question, just email ask jason at launch.co. And we will get your question or you can DM the TWI startups account on Twitter or Instagram and we'll get your question there. If you submit a video, bonus points and you get even a little more credit because we might shout out your company. So Niren says, I have a marketplace idea. Can the take rate be

very little to prove a consumer behavior slash traction to get seed funding or is it a red flag, Zach? I'll throw to you for the first one. Yeah, so, I mean, I think if you've looked at especially Chinese marketplaces, it's all over the place. Like there's been some very successful startups in China that have huge marketplaces that have tiny take rates. And there's, you know, obviously Alabama takes a large take rate. I would look at the take rate as less important when I look at marketplaces. What's way more important to me is the value to the sellers and the value to the buyers and what their comparable options are and how they think about that. a relative basis. Because if there's a huge amount of value, then clearly we can increase the

take rate. But if you're basically like an exact copy commodity, then you're in bigger trouble. And so it doesn't really help you. 100% correct. This is another example of a founder being focused on the wrong things. The take rate doesn't matter. The way in which you solve for the supply side and the demand side, that is the actual question of a marketplace. And to Zach's point, what other options do people have? And if you look at, you know, 2021, if you were going to make a marketplace for used cars, well, you're going to be up against a lot of people who are doing that already who have the supply.

And they've been marketing and they have tons of email lists that they've developed over decades. So you've got some serious moats there. what you're doing is a plastic founder mistake, which is just focusing on something that is actually not relevant. Other things that are not relevant, Zach, being in the 30 under 30 or the 40 under 40,

other things that are not relevant is you won a startup competition or you've been selected for, you know, this cloud computing platforms, you know, startup program. Like, when we see a deck and a founder puts in this kind of nonsense, we're like, what is your reaction?

Do you just shrug or just go, oh, they don't understand what's important? I mean, I mean, I was there. You know, I spent my years in the trenches doing, you know, making a continual number of mistakes. And I have a lot of empathy for, you know, when you're trying to pull something out of thin air, you're trying to make something from nothing.

You grab onto anything you can grab onto. And it's really easy to get distracted. by the things that are close to you and easy to grab, startup competitions, signing up advisor number N plus one, you know, getting your logo someplace, it seems really cool.

And I think the best startup founders are the ones that learn quickly that like the most important things are not what's easy to grab. The most important things are what's hard to solve. Figuring out the hard stuff. Right, do the hard stuff and focus on that. Even if it's a de minimis amount of, progress, getting from four to six customers is better than winning another startup competition. Yeah, absolutely.

That's fifth and six customers. So please stay focused founders on what matters. Another question coming in. This one will take live from Carlos on YouTube. I have been placing small bets over the last 12 months between one and $3,000 in pre-seed to seed. How should I be thinking about my follow-on investments? It's a great question. That's Zach and I, both of us, I think, you know, now finishing up our first decade of investing are having to contend with and strategize around.

Where do you come out on advice for Carlos? Yeah. So I think there's three things that you want to do that's super important. One is you need to understand that early stage investing and follow one investing has a very different practice area. There's very different return profiles. There's very different sort of ways. to think about the problem, and you need to basically have your strategy for early stage in one box that you continually improve on, and you need your strategy for follow one another box,

and understand that they're very separate. And the most important thing, as far as I'm concerned, for follow on investment, is all about information. So if you're deeply involved in the business and you have a lot of information, you can make really smart bets. If you don't have a lot of information, you need proxies. And so the best proxy is who's leading that next round. And so if you see Bill Gurley showing up, writing a big check into the next round, I'm going to put as much money as I can in all day long and be super happy about it. On the other hand, if it's a bunch of people coming together and writing a fall one no-name angel check, you need to be scared because if you don't have good information there, that's a good way to lose money and you don't have the same

return profile in that later stage follow-on investment that you do in the early one. And so you need to be really careful. And just the last thing I would say is remember as an angel it's not your job or your responsibility to keep the company alive. That's not your job. The company goes out of business? That's fine. It's totally okay. That's, I mean, this is such good advice. And you took a totally different spin of mind, which is why this is a great pick and roll one, two game we have going here in tag teaming. You're right. There are two different disciplines. Making that first bet is different than making the second bet. And certainly, you want to make sure that if it's a bridge financing, that it's not a peer or a dock, that it's an actual bridge to something.

somewhere and information is critical in making that second bet. I'm going to put those two things aside right now, and I'm going to take a different spin, which is bankroll management. Since you said you do one to three, I'm going to average it to two. Then I'm going to add, okay, you're making these small bets and you're doing 2K. I'm going to tell you, I think you need to get to 25 bets to have some level of diversification. $2,000 times $25 equals $50,000. I'm going to make another jump that you have a $1 million.

net worth, and you are putting $100,000 into angel investing, which would be aggressive but not outrageous if you have a job and you have something to pay your rent. So you have 100K bankroll, you put 50K into 25 companies. I'm going to assume five of those companies meet the criteria as Zach Collius has outlined, which is a bill girly or another notable investor is leading that next round. Now you have 50K left. There's five bets to me, 10K in each bet. What does that mean? It means in the five best companies, you deployed 60% of your capital. The 2K original investment times five is 10, and then five 10K bets.

So when you look at portfolio management, if we were playing poker, and these were your five best starting hands and or connections on the flop, it means you got 60% of your dollars into hands that connected with the flop. If you don't know what that is, you take a course on poker. Any feedback since we're doing this one, two game back and forth, Zach, on my advice? No, I think that's spot on. I think that's the right way to think about it. The secret in the early stage is to search for winners, and that's a discovery process. The secret to follow on is to pile into winners, and that's about basically information and understanding what's a winner and what's not, and avoiding losers.

Because your follow-ons, that's where you can lose real money, but you can make real money, too. Right. So in my bet, okay, you miss the flop. You're up against three players. there's an ace on the board and you have, you know, nine, ten. The board comes down with an ace and a king. You know, you know that you're beat. Yeah. And now you're going to try to take a swing at it with three other players. You're going to waste that 10K follow on.

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which now has live streaming services. Thanks for including us in the beta. A Nash from LinkedIn asks, how do you prioritize products when you have a suite of products for one single industry, but you don't have the bandwidth and resources to sell altogether? Okay. So how do you prioritize your products when you work in an industry? I'll let you interpret it as you will, Zah.

Yeah, I mean, I live by the sort of the mantra, one, one, one, one. You only have one. And it really comes down to a value delta, which is like, people heard me say this before, but I'll say it again. If you can't cold call a customer at 9 o'clock at 9, while they're putting their kid to bed on their cell phone, tell them what you do in one sentence and have them say,

oh my God, I want that. Instead of saying, you, why are you calling me? You're doing the wrong thing. You need to find that value where the customer's like, oh, wow, that's amazing. I want to talk to you tomorrow. And a suite of products invariably will never,

at least for early stage startups, will never achieve that. Suites or products come from companies that find that one thing, get massive amounts of distribution, and then once they have that distribution, they can build a suite of products underneath that umbrella. But, like, building a suite of products in the beginning and trying to level them up, I've never seen it work.

Like, there's... It cannot work. You are 100% correct. This is the death spiral of most founders, a lack of focus, trying to do too much, fighting too many wars on too many fronts. and they always say, well, Google has YouTube and Android and Chrome. Okay, Google is in their second decade.

Google has unlimited resources to your point. And Google added one product, I think, in the first five years, which was Gmail. Then another five years later, they bought Android and YouTube. They didn't actually build those. They did do Chrome internally. And then we go to Amazon, you know, aside from their delivery products, they added AWS probably in the second decade. They edit Amazon Prime video, again in the second decade, I think.

And so if Jeff Bezos and Larry and Sergey are focused on one thing for the first decade, you can stay focused on one thing for the first decade. Do not, do not, do not have founder ADHD. It will lead to pain and suffering. If you are a founder who cannot help themselves, then what you need to do is start a company and put somebody in to the captain's seat to sit there at the controls and run that company while you go off and do your next company. And we have examples of founders who do that, right? But, you know, this is a quick way to run out of capital and not hit excellence.

Jeremy from YouTube asked, is $1 million in ARR too big for guys like you? Zach? No, no. No, it's our sweet spot. Let's go. That's right. I hit the cover off that ball all day long. Yeah, absolutely. Put that in our strike zone, for sure. And I think both of us, you know, I don't know where you started, but I was writing the 25 to the 50K check on average 11 years ago. And now, I don't know, my last three deals were in the $1.5 to $3.7 million range

in terms of total amount of capital into each company. Where are you at in that sort of, where were you 10 years ago, where are you today in terms of average check size per deal? So I started with an angelous syndicate. So my first deal was 200K of other people's money. I put in 1K of my own because I had no money back then. That's the 200 to 1 ratio. Yeah, yeah.

No, it's a lot of people were like, oh, we don't like this. People complained about that. You're right. That's a good sidebar. People hated that. But it was like in the beginning. Well, they didn't think you had enough skin in the game, right? Yeah, people were really mad about that.

But it was in the beginning, my first deal was NIA. My next deal was Spark lead. The one after that was rackets and lead. So then people were like, well, we don't know what the Zach guy, but these guys are great. And so they joined the round because of that. Well, when you're making, if at the time you were making 100K, a 1K bet after tax money was real. I didn't have any money, that. I mean, I had no job then.

Like literally, like, we had just sold Trigot and I was like wandering around like a lost, wet little puppy trying to figure out what to do with my life. Functionally unemployable. And so what's the check size now, last three or four deals? So early stage, I'll do $500 to do a million. I'm pretty flexible. I'll go as little as, you know, I wrote a 50K check, like, you know, a couple months ago, which was fun. And I'll write. Do you still write those?

And under what circumstances? I did. So this one was into a company in a space that wasn't smart in. And a bunch of my sort of other investor friends were investing in it. And smart people I know were like, this is a great deal. You should do it. And I was like, oh, okay. I would actually have 100K, 100K total.

I wrote 50s in the role. So is a fail or bad. Yeah, it was like, I like the fact. educational. Yeah, I'm like, okay, let's just try it out. And it's, uh, it's marked up 10X in three months. So, all right. Crazy time we're living in right now.

It is crazy time. Well, you know, sometimes, you know, it's, I think some people do have like, I can't write that small of a check syndrome. And, you know, I understand that because I did say no a couple of times where people were using me who wanted the suite of products that I provide. You know, I want to be on the podcast. I want to keynote the next event. I want you to find me a CTO. I want you to tweet. And I have 25K available to you in this $3 million round.

Yeah. And the audacity was, I want you to prove to me that you can be a good investor. So I want you to do, pick two of these five things to do them to win the deal. Yeah. Like the Andreessen Horowitz kind of won the deal from benchmark for Clubhouse famously by getting celebrities on. And I was like, yeah, you know, I don't, you know, I'm in year 11 right now. I've put over $100 million to work. Thank you, but I'm not jumping through hoops to prove myself at this point.

But I show you where founders are out. Also, I told them it was a podcasting startup. And they're like, move your podcast over here and do stuff. I'm like, listen, pump the brakes. Like, I'm not here to solve your product market fit or your marketing problems. I'm an investor who may do that. But I don't know how you feel about this weird nature now where people are looking to their investors to kind of solve their maybe too many.

problems, right? Like the, you know, Clubhouse, can Andreessen Harowitz get Kevin Hard on Clubhouse? Kind of sets this new benchmark that we're responsible to do recruiting. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, I think it's a balance. I think you've got to like, you've got to find your cadence with the startup in terms of how to be most helpful, but in a way that fits into the way the business works.

So I'm invested in, you know, 50 companies. So there's a certain amount of time and energy I can give to each one. And some of them, use me more and they get more out of me and some of them are like great we love the fact we never have to talk to Zach he's an idiot and they just they just do what they do and like it's totally great whatever room's best for the company um but yeah there's certain things where they're like oh we want you to do x y or z and i'm like look i'm not smart there i'm not leveraged there i'm not the guy but if it's something that i can do easily like oh i need an introduction to you know jason i'm like well i can try to get you that we'll see he's a busy guy but i can send him an email

an easy one for you, of course. I mean, if you introduced me to somebody, I'm going to get on the phone. But I would make that ask unless it was a good one. Well, I mean, please make that ask. You know, this is a thing. When your friends actually, your friends are the ones you want to get the ask from. And then the least likely to ask you. So just to my people who are actually my friends, please ask because people who write me these emails and they're like, oh, J-Cal, I need your help with this.

And can you, I'm having a non-pro. I'm doing a fundraiser. Can Elon Travis and Mark Cuban be the. host of it with you and the besties too. And I'm like, I don't know. Can they? Like, I'm your fundraising committee for your kids high school. Like, are you kidding me?

Richard from YouTube's asks, is it possible to get angel funding while working on a startup part-time, read second full-time job? What if there is some juicy traction metrics? Ah, there's a rub here. Yeah. I just dealt with this for my business insider profile. They asked me the same question because we have on our website for the launch accelerator. we want you to we don't accept people who are doing side hustles take our hundred thousand dollars quit your job and your job will still be there if you lose our hundred thousand over the

next six months trying to make the startup work and we're okay with that what are your thoughts that i mean i think if if the if the traction metrics are that good then you should be ready to quit your job and yeah i mean look if you send me traction metrics that are that good and you're like, look, I need the funding to quit my job. I'd be like, okay, here you go. But they've got to be that good, right? And I think generally it's most people think in reality there's a big delta there. So, yeah.

I agree with you. And great metrics are awesome. Side hustles are awesome. I really love what people are doing Daniel over a pioneer app and indie hackers. I mean, there are great places to sort of work on your side hustle. And if you're a bootstrap or side hustler, to me, that is like super, super appealing because it means that you're creating, not waiting. And if you're creating and not waiting and you can work two jobs and you start to move the

needle on metrics, you know, you get to that, I'll even say five to 15K a month in revenue, a thousand people using your product every week and getting actual value. from it? For sure, reach out. Okay, let's take another question. Yanik from YouTube. How do you find investments? Do you also, in quotes, ignore cold contacts and only focus on startups that have been suggested introduced by someone you know. The classic question. Zach, how do you handle cold inbound? And what's your deal flow? I read every cold inbound I get. I respond with pretty much a form response to most of them because I'm not, literally my form response is, thanks for reaching out. This seems cool. Sadly, I'm not smart enough in this, like, which is 99% of time I'm not.

So I just can't invest in stuff that I'm an idiot in. Good luck. Like, you know, if you want me to invest in your, you know, aerospace company, I'm like, like, I don't know anything about aerospace or whatever. The majority of my deal flow comes from my friends and my network, people who I've, I've known for a long time. It's easy to invest in them or they send me stuff and it's easy. They've filtered it so it's a much higher quality. And some of my deal for comes from really random places. So someone will send me a deck and they'll be like, hey, I saw this deck somewhere and I'll be like, oh, I want to meet that founder and next thing and I invest.

And I've done that. And some of it comes from you. Like, you know, I wander around, look at all the great startups that you bring around you. And every now and then I find one I get excited about. Sure. I mean, that's how the industry works. The filtering process is so much. that we rely on each other to share the filtered companies.

And we know that early stage as a collaborative sport, as opposed to maybe the Series A or Series B zone, where you might have some investors who want to take the whole round. In terms of myself, when I was a solo operator, I'm a solo GP right now, but I've got a team around me, and we have five researchers slash associates at this point who do about 15 introductory calls a week also reach out to companies.

So I am forwarding the majority of my cold emails that are coming in now to them. And I just forward it to a group email address. I let them evaluate it now. If it is anywhere remotely close to being in our zone, we do what's called a, we offer a 20-minute introductory call.

So if you have an idea, maybe not. But if you have a finished product or an MVP and it looks reasonable, you're going to probably get onto an introductory call, which is recorded on Zoom. And it's 20 minutes, seven minutes of you presenting to us, seven minutes of Q&A back and forth, maybe five minutes of cleanup or any, you know, next steps. Then it goes to the managing directors, anything that's in our zone, they then send to me. I download the video, put it on 1.5 speed, and I watch it with VLC player.

And I've got my own little system now. So that's how I deal with this ridiculous amount of deal flow. So I'm just giving you a big secret here. Zach, even for yourself as you build yours, you can find somebody who is a researcher out of school for a reasonable amount of money. And I just put up a website, how to get a job in VC.com.

Where I explain, I'll pay you $250K for four years of work if you do the kind of work I'm talking about, research associate kind of work. And I hire, you know, know, what I'll just say, blue collar, people who didn't go to Stanford or Harvard and who want to break in and who want to put in the 50, 60 hours a week it takes to do this job properly. And I love cold emails. I mean, some of the greatest investments I've ever made were people stopping me in the street or a cold email.

So please, please keep sending them. You probably keep hearing about SOC2 compliance and you think, hmm, is this really relevant to me? Well, if you're targeting any large enterprise as a customer, there are all sorts of data privacy and security measures that you need to have buttoned up to close those deals. And you don't want your engineering team taking time out to do this stuff. And you definitely don't want to hire a third-party auditor. Nope, it's no joke. Getting a Stock Tool compliant can take months and it can cost tons of money.

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All right. Harris Pecks from YouTube says, why is the investment landscape still very insular? The old boys brigade is still two. prevalent. Do you agree with that, Zach? No, I don't think that's true anymore. Yeah, that's not true at all. I think you can look around. There's a lot of young guns going after those old boys, and we are tearing their guts out right now. Like, you've got, you got Tiger, who's definitely not the

old boy network coming down from the top, just like attacking the late stage funds. And then you got folks like me and Jason and others come from the bottom, attacking. Like, if I was a VC fund on Sand Hill Road right now, I'd be like, oh, shit. We're in trouble. I mean, they're fighting, they're getting, they've got a guerrilla warfare going on with rolling funds, syndicates, and all types of accelerators, incubators, on one front and scout programs. Then they're fighting literally, you know, an air war from Tiger who is just dropping

bunker busters on people. And so if you're in that mid-tier, unless you're sequoia, Unless you're craft, unless you're Bill Gurley and benchmarking, you have a brand, man, those series A folks are just, they got giant bombs landing over here. And then you've got people like us just, you know, kneecapping them, you know, or setting little booby traps. It's going to be harder and harder. This, you could not be more wrong. Your information is correct in 2000.

And it has not been correct since. Thanks to, I think, I would, if I really wanted to give credit here, I think, Naval an Angelist and Paul Graham and Y Combinator, and to a lesser extent, you know, the sort of angel brigade brigade of Zach, you know, Chris Saka, Sagan, myself. We just kind of got really aggressive about writing checks quick and getting that first 500K in which, you know, the VC said it's too much work. There's too many startups. So they basically gave us the job of sorting startups. So they basically wanted to write the 510K check and whatever we were doing and then another 20k check. Well, guess what?

We grew up. And now Zach and I can write one three million dollar check. So I was having a conversation with a friend of mine. And they were like, you're doing series A's now? And I was like, just led three series A's. And if you want to co-lead, I'll co-lead. And they're like, oh, I guess the person literally said to me, Zach, I guess we're competitive now. Yeah. And I said, are we? And they said, yeah. And I was like, okay. bummer. Welcome to the new party. It ain't like the old party.

And you know what? The winner in all of this, society, because there'll be more funded startups, employees because there'll be more jobs, and most of all founders, because they will have more funding sources to do it. Heck, you and I are now going to have to contend with Republic and Seed Invest and Equity crowdfunding. Where there is no, yes and no, but I mean, when I saw, you know, when you saw Gumroad, you know, this $5 million

dollar gum road deal, I looked at that and said, you know, that could have been a syndicate and a seed fund. Yeah. And instead, there's no lead. Yeah. That's just Sahil going direct to his customers. So if you have customers who love you, there's going to be a next generation.

And this is what capitalism in America is so f***ing great. You can beep that out. It's so f***ing great what we have in this free system in competition because it never ends. Josh from LinkedIn. what percent should you sell to an angel if you have an MVP but before a customer what percent after you get some traction and a little money i'm going to say a little bit of revenue so there's

two questions there you got the MVP no customers how much should you sell and then and i'll even put like at what valuation we'll come up with a dollar amount and a percentage and then let's say i'll say a little bit of money is 10k a month in revenue in today's market 2021. And I'm going to say the MVP is good. I'll give you a little more information. So it's a good MVP. Like the product feels snappy and crisp. Crisp MVP. No customers. Yeah. I mean, it's so all over the board, right? Because it's like, you know, it could be as low as a $4 million pre. And it could be as high as, you know, like I just saw a 20 pre deal that was not that far away from that. And was it a serial founder?

No, no. Wow, that's bonkers. Well, it's great traction and a great team and a great validation in the market. Okay, so they did have customers or people using it, but not revenue. Yeah. Users. Okay, so it's a little different. So I agree with that on the early stage.

I would say, you know, if you're in a major market and you've got a snappy MVP, $3, 4, 5 million dollars as a tap on your note, raising $250 to $500 would be, reasonable. In other words, you're giving away 10% of the company to the Angels. Now let's take the second one. You got to 10K in revenue, 120k a year, let's make it reoccurring revenue. 120k and reoccurring revenue.

You want to raise how much and what valuation in today's market? I mean, I'm, uh, minimum. I've seen, yeah, I've, I've seen, you know, call it eight free, would be sort of like low end.

and then to the moon on the high end. I literally was going to say eight. Yeah, I was going to say eight to ten. Yeah. And you really, the velocity also matters. So if the 10 turns into 20 month over month or the 10 turns into 10,200, that's another determining factor. So how much are you growing month over month?

But you're looking to sell in those angel rounds 10, no more than 20%, because you have to be prepared for three more rounds of funding. So great question. Let's see. I'm going to go to Twitter. Joe Timmons, 79. I didn't know there were 78 other Joe Timmons. What is, I think he was born in 79.

What is the biggest missed investment opportunity you're willing to admit and why did you pass on them? And looking back, were you wrong about the company's prospects? The anti-portfolio, classic question. I always talk about Twitter and Zinga. What are yours? Yeah. So the one I like to talk about. But I'll give you two.

I'll give you. The one I talk about is Uber. So, like, I met Uber when it was an idea. And Travis and I had this huge debate about whether or not he would be able to make it work. And I was like, look, the taxi lobby is going to crush you. There's not a chance. Like, you're fighting with laws and corrupt bureaucrats here. You're going to get killed.

And he's like, I'm a fighter. I'm going to win this. And it actually taught me important. You identified the key. You literally identified the key. a risk factor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the thing for me that taught me is that, like, the best, most exciting startups

are the ones that have really clear normative violations. And the normative violation was, can you succeed in violation of the rules that these dumb cities have put in place and the corruption that they have? And he demonstrated that it's possible. And so now when I look at other deals that have, like, normative violations like that, I think, okay, maybe there's this thing that obviously. is going to cause them to die. But what happens on the other side? And there, it was super clear. Like, you push a button and you get a car. Oh, my God, that's like the most valuable

thing ever. And so the other side of that normal evaluation was just unlimited value creation. And so, like, when I see startups now that have that, that's where I get really excited because that's when the real money gets made. And see, what I love about this is what we're talking about here is not having an axe to grind or being depressed about our mistakes. What we're talking about here is refining the process and trusting the process and thinking about how to make your process better. So if you are an investor, I encourage you to just look at your process and say, how can I be 10% better every month, every six months, whatever it is. And I am constantly looking at my process and just saying, you know, what have I learned over the years? And one of the

things I learned over the years was that, you know, a founder who wants to take a really competent founder who wants to take on a really difficult task to your point, Zach, is a founder worth betting on for two reasons. One, they're competent. And two, if they are able to solve something that seems unsolvable and insurmountable, the prize is generally huge. The other thing I've learned is not to obsess about losses. And this took me a decade. And I'm really only just getting there now. I really did not accept defeat in a good way. Now I look at it. And when I see the staggering nature of certain returns, Tom, Robin Hood, and Uber specifically, and emerging ones like FitBod, Stezy, Grand, some of these ones from the last five years, I just say, you know what,

I, when somebody shuts down, I give the founder a big hug, virtual or otherwise, and say, you know, lick your wounds, enjoy your one year at Facebook, you know, in your act you hire, and come back to me as quick as possible with your next idea because you learned a heck of a lot,

you worked hard, and the quicker I have eight companies fold, the more energy I can focus on the two that didn't. Now, that sounds cutthroat, but the truth is that is also true for founders, isn't it exact? The quicker, they say,

you know what? Triggott's got, you know, an ups, there's a certain cap to how far I can take this thing, or Mahalo has a certain cap to how far I can take this thing. I need to move on to the next thing, right? The opportunity cost. So I would, I would be very careful there. Like, there's a, there's a yin and yang to everything in life. And the yin and yang around this one is that cutting your losses when it's a loser is just as critical, is not giving up when you can fight your way through that, that wall. And so, like Travis fighting his way through the bureaucracy.

Most founders would have given up when the seats and desist showed up. And that's when Travis started fighting. Like he brought down. Yeah. And so there's nothing like a cornered animal. Like they're super dangerous, right? And I think this is a very important point. And this is a great yin yang moment, which is sometimes you have to fold and sometimes

you got to go all of them. You know, and it really depends. And it's situational, right? And Travis just said, I'm all in. If I'm going down, I'm going to go down fighting. How much money does your startup spend on various software products and how much time does it take to integrate them altogether? Let me guess. Way too much time.

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Go to Odo.com slash twist to check it out and get that. thousand dollars. O-D-O-O-O-com slash twist. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Sasha from YouTube says, be careful, everyone. Don't just take money from anyone. Can't believe he isn't saying anything about doing your diligence on your VC firm. Well, actually, I'll put that in the form of a question. How does one, should one diligence their VC firm, I think is an obvious answer. Yeah. So I'll expand Sasha's very good point. Thank you, Sasha from YouTube, and say, how does one diligence a venture firm?

If you're a nobody in the industry, you're just getting started a first startup, you just got accepted to an accelerator, now you're at Demo Day, you got 20 meetings, you're starting to get some term sheets in, how does Sasha, or whoever it is,

actually do diligence on a VC firm? Yeah, so what I say to my founders is the moment that a VC gives you a term sheet, the traction just flipped. And so before you were asking, now they're begging you to take their terms. So now you're in the driver's seat. And so what you want to do in that moment is you actually want to slow down the process because you want to make sure you're making the right call.

And so what I do when I'm looking at a VC firm is I start with their portfolio companies. And I go through every founder in the portfolio companies. And I get an introduction not from the VC, but from somebody else to the founders of those companies being like, hey, what are these guys like to work with? and then I go down the list and I'm looking for every single contact point I possibly could have with that VC firm not just the partner that I'm going to work with

but who are the other partners? Because like you could spend a hundred hours diligence in your VC firm and it probably wouldn't be enough. Like you really want to know who these folks are because there's some people who are going to ruin your life and you got to make sure that you pick the people that are yeah.

You remember that um, what's his name from uh, uh, uh, Ryan callback and he had the co-lab fund VC, and he wrote that huge letter of the board member and then released it of how this guy just tortured him and just was abusive towards him. Yeah. And I think the backdoor reference is what I'd like to highlight in Zach's example, which is do not ask, you know, me or Zach for which founders to talk to. Now, in our cases, we take the work seriously and I can tell you, you know, you can talk to any of our founders.

And we'll give you ones that, you know, are likely to call you back. But here's a little trick for you. Go look at the logos on the person's website. If you're really seriously going to take their money, and then look at their crunch-based profile and find companies that are no longer listed on their portfolio page because they probably took them off because they had a falling out. And if you email somebody and say,

hey, can I get your candid feedback? I'm thinking about working with, you know, this co-lab guy or collaborative fund guy. I've got what episode that was. Somebody will give me the episode right now. but you know, you're going to get the candid feedback. Now, there's two sides to every story. It is quite possible for a founder and a VC to have a falling out

and effort to be the founder's fault or the VC's fault or just a bad match. So do keep that in mind. Ryan called back, called Beck was on the program on episode 1141 from Circle Up and he had a disastrous VC. Watch that episode. It is required reading. And I'm just going to ask. producer Justin to maybe put that on the lessons learned and give it to cuts for the founding university stuff.

And let's put that on pod notes. We are making post podcast notes on every episode on a notion instance right now. We may move it over to Rome or wikimedia, but if you go to bitly.com slash twist notes, bitly.com slash twist notes. I think we've done about 20 episodes. These are the cliff notes, the spark notes, you know, your smartest friend in college who took really good notes. These are those notes and you can contribute to them. And if you do and you do three, four, five of them, your chances of getting a cup of coffee with

me go to 100%. Okay. Access is everything, baby. It is. It's true. Okay, everybody. We're going to touch the third rail. We're going to go there.

We're going to talk about cancel culture. We're going to talk about misogyny. We're going to talk about Apple and Antonio Garcia Martinez, who was recently fired over. over comments in his book, Chaos Monkeys, which is actually a great read. If you don't know, the Verge, Casey Newton, a bunch of folks over there

and Business Insider reported that Apple had fired and rescinded a job offer for Antonio who previously worked at Facebook to go work at Apple. On May 10th, Business Insider reported that Apple had hired Facebook's ads PM, Antonio Garcia Martinez, who is very outspoken, highly intelligent, very funny.

And they helped him to lead their growth ambitions in the advertising space. But on May 12th, the verge reported that over 2,000 Apple employees signed a petition for an investigation into Antonio's hiring in the petition the employees. I'm going to read a quote here. In the petition, the employees expressed concern about Garcia Martinez's views on women and people of color. His hiring, quote, calls into questions parts of our system. of inclusion at Apple included hiring panels,

background checks, and our process to ensure our existing culture of inclusion is strong enough to withstand individuals who don't share on inclusive values. They wrote, we are deeply concerned. Now, I don't think this is Apple writing this.

This is in the petition. So just so we're clear. We are deeply concerned about the recent hiring of Antonio Garcia Martinez. Employees wrote in the petition his misogynistic statements in his autobiography, such as, and here's the quote that will be on his tombstone

and that he will be known for for all time. Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted, I think is how you pronounce that word and naive, despite their claims of world and generally full of S-H-I-T. Directly oppose Apple's commitment to inclusive diversities. Regarding that quote, in, let's just play the quote, Antonio read it on Kara Swisher's in an interview with Caraswisher back in 2016, and he actually explained and put it in context.

after the other side of the quote, I've got Zach Collius with me, who knows Antonio, who has been on this very podcast, on the news roundtable with him, and Zach has some feelings on it. So we're going to play this two minute and 20 second clip because it does give you the full context

of the quote, and then we can have an intelligent discussion after the two minutes and 20 seconds. Here we go. Because they don't wear button down shirts and whatever. And they like the gays. Right, exactly. But they are complete reactionaries,

very conservative and not nearly as liberal intolerant as they think they are. So let's talk a little bit about that because, you know, you've gotten dinged for it and deservedly, because some of your lines in the book are a little misogynist. I think, to be fair, very misogynist, actually. The one about trading women for guns, which was interesting, which is truthful. Well, you have to put that quote in context, I think. Well, here it is. If there was an apocalypse and you had a choice, your wife is not someone you would trade for guns. Is that correct? Well, hold on. Well, I could, well, I could almost feel like it probably almost read. I want you to read it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got it marked off.

Good. Because this thing isn't a gall on my tombstone, frankly. Yeah, it is. Yeah, that's okay. So this is about the woman that had my children. Right. And I'm, this is like, you know, I'm sort of praising her. The British woman.

The British traitor. Right. She had wild green eyes with unnatural red spots in their irises when you pulled close, reminiscent of that Afghan girl from the National Geographic color. Her personality was flinty and rough and as leathery as her skin. She had spent years between various jobs backpacking around the rougher parts of the world. She was an imposing broad-shouldered presence, six feet tall and bare feet. and towering over me in heels.

Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted naive, despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they become precisely the sort of useless baggage you trade for a box of shotgun shells or a gerry can of diesel.

And this is the important thing to put in context. I am contrasting this broad originalization to the reality of the woman that I was falling in a moment. Okay. British trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that post-apocalypse, doing whatever work, be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast to someone's back required doing. Long story short, you wanted to tie your genetic wagon to the bucking horse of her bloodline. Okay. So if I'm going to be quoted, it'll be quoted in context.

I read the whole thing. It was very funny. I could believe someone said that. I've heard it said, but people won't say it in person. So like I said, the reviews have been all over the place. One has been, you know, I don't like your book because everything that's wrong with. Silicon Valley. And it's like... So they're blaming you to that.

Well, of course. It's like looking at Picasso's Garnika and saying, oh, it's everything wrong with war. Like, yeah, that's the point. Exactly. Right. And like you're saying, I'm only saying things that everyone says, but just never says in public. All right. So they have it. You know, when put in context, you know, I think it is not like this quote was a quote in the New York Times about women. in Silicon Valley, it was him going extremely hard on Bay Area culture in order to praise

the mother of his children. And obviously, he is taking a, I don't know, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Carrowack, Hemingway-esque, you know, and listen, I didn't study English literature or any kind of literature to be that, to be totally honest here. But he's obviously, you know, being a wordsmith here trying to. to be super, super evocative and obviously interesting and controversial. Zach, what's your take on the quote itself. And, you know, on a scale of, you know, it's misogynistic without the context,

and let's call that a 10 on misogyny's now. Women are stupid. Women are weak. It actually sounds as hardcore as that when you hear it out of context. In context, where does it fall for you? Um, you know, I'm not matter. Like, I, I really don't. I think the more interesting question is we've moved away from a contextualized sort of dialogue.

The, the, in, in context, every, like, so I tweeted about this and I told, I said it, it made me sick that people are trying to get him fired from his job because. he wrote a book that was a New York Times bestseller and he wrote it in a like you said a hundred Thompson way and some of the things he did in there were great and some of the things in there were terrible and but in general people lots of people thought it was a really well-written exciting book and it was a big issue with this publisher right yes oh yeah yeah and he sought out people's feedback on this specific quote is that true yeah yeah and he kept it in but were you one of the people he sought out for advice? Antonio and I talk about a lot of things and

he made the choices that he made about trying to make a book that was truly exciting and interesting and you know it's that's a balance. I'm not a writer and like I'm not an expert in that balance and I don't claim to be and sometimes in order to basically have something exciting

you have to go to the edge. You can't just write in sort of like you know graduate seminar or sort of like politics writing language, you have to basically say, how do I basically try to explore, you know, the sexism that we all live amongst? How do I explore the racism that we all live amongst? How do I explore these questions in order to, to share a broader view of a world, of a time? Because that period that he was attempting to capture was, you know, a really important period in human history. And the story is a difficult story to tell. But my point is,

I'm less interested in the quote because I think the quote in and of itself is not true. Like most women that I know in the Bay Area are not like that. It's not what he believes. I've known him for a long time and that's not something he actually believes to be true. And I think it really was intended to be in context a way to really push up how amazing this other woman was. And so I struggle with this world where the Twitter sort of fight

is not about the context. It's about that one little blurb in a much longer paragraph that I really, I really hate that. I think that sucks. Like, I look nuances what we should strive for. And we're going in the opposite direction. Yeah. I mean, here's what I would say. If you cross out most women and you say most men in the Bay Area are soft and weak.

Yes. So true. I would say in the zombie apocalypse, there is almost nobody. There's no. guys in the area I would want on my team. I would take you. I would take Chimov. I wouldn't take Sacks.

I might take Freedberg. Sacks might be really good though in the apocalypse. And you put him in the base. What's that? Sacks, I can, I could have won sacks in my team. Sex is not going to be good in a fight. But no,

but we don't need him for the fight. We need for everything else. There's a whole bunch of other things. It's like, but strategy. But he's, you know what he's like on the Walking Dead? You know the guy who makes the bullets?

Yeah. There's a guy who like is like a real genius, but he's, He's kind of a, I want to say, I'm not saying Sax is a coward. I'm not saying, Sax is going to do well against a hoard. But we played Pope with Saxon, man. That guy's got, he would be like, he would rebuild society and come up with the new law. So he would be good to keep around for that.

We need to keep sex. I think, I agree. Most women in the Bay Area, I'm for the exact opposite of soft and weak. I mean, if you're a woman and you survived in the tech industry, which was pretty gnarly, and it was a boys club. And it still is in a lot of ways. and still is in many ways. You're actually strong.

So, you know, the quote doesn't make a lot of sense. I think he was going for artistic license here. And he's talking about a zombie apocalypse. What I will say is what I tell all founders, which is if you're funny and you're the funniest guy at your poker game, your company, you're still not Chris Rock. You're still not Dave Chappelle. You're still not Jerry Seinfeld. And context matters.

Yeah. He wrote this in the context of a book. He did not write in the. the context of, you know, a Slack room. Yeah. And the problem is, you know, if you try to do both in today's charged environment, this is the result. And so maybe this can be the start of a dialogue of, is there room for people to either

change, you know, restate, clarify, or be contrite about a quote and say, you know, it didn't come out the way I meant. Just like when a joke doesn't land. And I'm a funny guy. I make jokes all the time. But I throttle myself. I don't tell the same jokes on the pod that I might tell, you know, at three in the morning with a bunch of friends having beers.

I mean, you have to understand context. And so I wonder, we have not heard. And, you know, I put this in the area of him doing comedy. he was trying to make jokes in the book. And he's a great writer. I give him that. Even when you start hearing his description of the mother of his kids,

it's like a really great descriptor, he just stepped in it with this, you know, an incorrect quote that actually is kind of hurtful and I have three daughters and, you know, I don't want them to live in a world where people think like this. And it didn't land. And so now are we going to be about, are people at Apple so,

feels so unsafe by Antonio that he can't work there? Or is this an opportunity to have a conversation about it? Apparently, you know, you're on both sides now. It's either going to be Coinbase where you can't talk about this stuff, where it's going to be Apple, where if you tripped up in any point and you said something out of context and a quote, you're done. And I think as a society, we need to create a dialogue. And that dialogue should somehow be about, you know,

what we're talking about here, Zach. And I think that's why I was, you know, was delighted to hear because I know you guys are friends that you would talk about this. Like, what if he apologized for the quote, you know? And Apple explained the quote in context and said, it's a learning moment like Obama did. I don't know if you remember that beer summit moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The beer.

I kind of feel like there's a beer summit moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I also feel like, you know, things are so toxic right now that we should just move on. And he'll get other work. this is only going to increase the value of his next book deal. I'll be totally honest. And, you know,

Yeah. The best idea I've heard about this is Bologi suggested that every employment contract should have a 90-day cooling off period in it for basically things like this. Now, I don't know, the legal language is going to be really tricky. But it's like, okay, if something like this occurs, there's a cooling off period where the arbitration, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. It's like where both sides can basically like maybe dig a little deeper and take a little more time. And the the company in this instance doesn't feel pressured to make a decision. They can't make a decision. And they can they can evaluate what the right answer is. And, you know, like for instance, like if Antonio basically was to apologize for the fact that he stepped in it there, which he did, right?

I didn't actually see an apology yet. No, I, I, he's, he is, he's definitely. He's gagged right now, right? We have not heard anything publicly from Antonio. That means they gave him, they gave him six months severance. I will not, I will not, talk about it. I will not say anything until he said anything. Apple wants to make it go away, so I'm sure Apple's going to give him six months or a year of salary,

which is going to then tweak the other side. But, I mean, think about the hypocrisy here, um, as well, as APRO has, and I, I don't think I've addressed this on the pod yet, but, Apple's recently been accused, and I don't know if we could make a definitive ruling, to your point about cooling off periods, that some of the suppliers to their iPhones are using Uighurs and slave labor. So somebody did a really, you know, provocative tweet where they were like, I'm going to burn all of Antonio's books in front of the slave labor that Apple is using to build iPhones.

Pretty interesting take. I mean, look, this is the company that made Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. a billionaire. Dr. Dre basically said women ain't but he used to be a word. And then just like, I mean, come on here. Like like, like, I think that things get really complicated really fast and that's okay. We live in a complicated world. But what's scary to me is that we're solving problems not by nuance and complexity and really thinking these things through, but instead on 140 characters, taking things out of context, and then attacking people for, like, that and destroying

their lives. Because the thing about Antonio that really sucks here, and this is the thing that really makes me angry. So the reason why he went to work at Apple is not because he didn't have other choices. He had a bunch of other choices. He went there because he wanted to get a job. He could do something interesting. That's great. But more importantly, he wanted to spend time with his daughter in the Bay Area. And so he literally sold his compound up on the islands of outside of Seattle to, move down here to buy a house to spend time with his daughter. Now that I think about it, he has a hell of a lawsuit. His whole world, he literally just like, he just traded his whole world for the

opportunities to work a boring ass corporate job at a boring ass corporate company just so that he had the income so that he could be with his daughter while she grows up. And like, so it's like the irony of this, this moment where he's attempting to be this very mature man doing like something really, really, really, really, really important. important and instead he gets cut down by a bunch of like people who are attacking him like for something that was public information. I'm I really struggle with. And you know, there's context and the subtlety of this is important. I mean, we're we're going to have to as a society as we resolve issues that are valid of people being diminished, demoralized, attacked. We're going to

just have to put some things in context and it feels like, you know, you have, you don't have people walking out of Netflix because of Dave Chappelle, right? Like, are people quitting Netflix because Dave Chappelle says something? Okay, no. Netflix, but in Apple, an employee who, you know, wrote something that is offensive, but nowhere near as offensive as what, you know, Chappelle says in an average show or I wouldn't say even offensive, you know, straight up, you know, challenging, triggering, whatever. Like, there's going to have to be some nuance here. And then we're also having TV shows, songs, and podcasts that, you know,

Spotify and others, Netflix and Hulu are putting warnings in front of or otherwise taking off their services. And, yeah, some context here would be better. He's going to have a heck of a lawsuit. I think he could sue them for a five-year settlement. And because he did. he's a published author with the New York Times bestseller.

If they offered him, and he's the kind of guy who would get a job for $250,000 to $500,000, this is going to damage his... No, no, no, way more than that. He's an expensive person. He's like, he literally is

one of the world's experts. Let's say you got a million dollar. Let's just, I'm going to put it at $500,000. Okay. But I'm going to pick a ballpark number. 500,000 plus 500,000 RSUs. Total comp a million dollars a year. He's now

unemployable, they have destroyed his reputation by doing this. And now some people might argue he destroyed it, but these quotes were out there. We just played a clip of Kara Swisher, I believe, at a live event, talking about this. So because Apple, this is all just coming together in my head here, because Apple didn't do their diligence or didn't think the employees would have this reaction, and because they gave to the employees, they have destroyed Antonio's ability to do commerce in the world. They will be responsible. I think any,

it was, yeah, that was a clip from the Rico decode podcast in 2016. Shout out to Kara Swisher for not suing me. And Jim Faga for not suing me for using it. I think it's fair use. That's fair. Anyway,

come on. I think, we're giving your free publicity. Exactly. I think he would, I think a lawyer would be able to argue successfully in court that they damaged his career and would be responsible for his salary for the next 20 years. Yeah, I'm not aware.

I'm going to say he gets a, I think if he hires the right attorneys and he goes to the mat on it, it could be a $10 million settlement. Because they, he's a New York Times bestselling author. They can't say we didn't know he wrote this book. And they can't say that they hired it from this position and didn't know about the Kara Swisher interview. you. They can't say that. Well, they're going to give him $10 million is my best guess.

Five to $10 million is a settlement. Okay, listen, Zach, I appreciate you touching the third rail with me on this. This is the point. I think that's the thing that makes me sad, right? This shouldn't be a third rail. This is something that we should be able to talk about openly and try to come up with like nuanced

positions. And like, we don't I don't have to be necessarily. I'm not right here. You're not right here. No one's right here. It's like, how do we figure out how to deal with this problem going forward. I mean, if you told me somebody said that and you said, you know, they're going to come work for me, without the context, I would not hire them, right? With the context, I would have to have a conversation with my team and say, this person said

this, here's the full context. I have a lot of women who work with me. I would say, you know, do you want to talk to him? Do you want to go down this road? And I would have had a very inclusive discussion about. hey, is this like a risk we want to take, right? Like I, at one point in my career, I hired somebody who was a hacker, inadvertently, who had a felony charge, and I had to own that, and it was difficult.

And, you know, employment is, it's another thing we have to think about. Like, we have massive compassion for somebody who comes out of jail after 20 years for arm robbery, maybe even assault, murder, and they try to get back on track. Yeah. but somebody writes a quote in a book that's offensive. Nobody would argue it's not offensive. And they can never work again. So that is, I think, something we're going to have to contend with is like, what is the path to redemption here?

If he wrote a statement that he was sorry about the quote, he disavows the quote, he restates it, whatever, goes to therapy or, I don't, I mean, I don't know if they have to get ridiculous here, but there should be some path to this person being horrible again. And Paul Graham, who, you know, is probably pretty triggering. AGM is actually a good guy. I believe that. That's true. He might write the occasional shocking thing for effect, but he'd never, for example, organize a petition to deprive someone of their livelihood. So that's a nuanced take.

Stripe employee says, we turn down many people at Stripe for saying much less. Doesn't matter if somebody is a good guy. This is in response to Paul Graham. many good guys don't get hired. It's a bad idea to hire people who say things for shock value, especially if those things alien half the population. That's also a valid point. That's a pretty nuanced take.

And David Sachs' take, given the number of woke millennials and zoomers who claim their safety is threatened. Anytime they encounter a dissenting viewpoint, work from home may be common necessity just to prevent spurious HR claims. I think that this has nothing to do with this Antonio quote, but he had just said that recently. And I think that actually, maybe that is the nuanced thing. I don't know. But I tell you something.

Antonio is going to give five to ten million bucks and a million dollar book advance for the next book where he savaged his canceled culture or whatever. And really, I mean, Apple should, if these Apple employees are serious, I don't know where they, did they fight against Dr. Dre becoming a billionaire? Yeah, I don't know.

That's a really good question. I think that... Or did they... Yeah. That's... No, we won't talk about misogyny. I mean, come on. I mean, rap lyrics.

I mean, and then the misogyny and rap lyrics run so deep. Do you should... Should all rap be erased from culture? Yeah. Maybe Apple music should... Certainly should you be able to press play on rap music. And according to the Wall Street Journal, actually. Apple's upcoming foray into television.

It's back from 2018, Dr. Drea Biodrama. series Vital Signs got the axe from CEO Tim Cook himself because the show's adult themes, which include characters doing lines of cocaine and extended orgy in a mansion and drawn guns. So Tim Cook, I think, probably was able to correct his own mistake in engaging with Dr. Dre for these character issues. I think this opens up a whole can of worms. All right. They have it, folks.

These are not easy subjects to talk about. Thank you, Zach, for talking about them with us. And let's as a society try to move forward. Let's just figure out how to have better conversations. That's what I want. Yeah, better conversations be good for everybody. Let's let's let people like Antonio own their mistakes. And let's let the people who have problems with those mistakes point them out.

And let's have conversations about them instead of all picking up our swords and attacking, attacking, attacking. It's just like. Yeah, there you have it, folks. All right, listen, this has been amazing. We'll see you all next time on Ask an Angel. with Zach Collius and Jason Kalakhanes.