This Week in Startups - Best of This Week in Startups: Week of November 2nd, 2020

Episode Date: November 7, 2020

E1133 featuring podcasting pioneer Dave Winer: https://rb.gy/pwpmiy E1134 featuring ChowNow's Chris Webb: https://rb.gy/ioevs2 E1135 featuring Density's Andrew Farah: https://rb.gy/julse0 Follow Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

On episode 1133, podcasting pioneer and internet legend Dave Weiner told Jason old Steve Jobs and Bill Gates stories from the golden age of tech. Let's see. I got there in the fall of 1979. And yeah, my first call was Apple. I mean, I had come there from I was living in Madison, Wisconsin, and where I had gone to grad school. And I had developed two products. One was a relational database, and the other was an outliner, which is what I eventually made my career on, the first version of it of my career. And I wanted to hook up with somebody to publish it. I didn't want to start a company. And so I had some sales background. I have to keep this very abbreviated because it's a long story. But, yeah, I did meet with Steve Jobs.

and and and um and he said pitch him on an outliner and this is like the year before they went public want the outliner he wanted the database and yeah and he and i told him you should want the outliner that's the product for you i mean you've got the outliner machine here and this fucking machine is never going to run a database come on get real this is like apple two days or apple two right the apple two had just they just come out with the floppy drive. You know how much data could fit on the floppy drive? Wow, is it $360K?

140K. 140K. Yeah. And that was per side, right? So if you clipped it and flipped it over? No, no, I think that was both sides. I don't know how they did it. That was never really, no, I, whatever, you never flipped the disc over.

Nobody ever did that, yeah. So, so, so he said, well, you know, basically fuck off. And I said, you got any recommendations on where I could go from. here and he said well you could go to this company we just turned down their product um and it was visi-calc so right that that was i mean i think they made a mistake in turning down the outliner but it they definitely made a mistake in turning down visical and um i guess they thought nobody would want to do that on the apple too and when i met with them uh they uh they were actually looking for an outliner and that was, I thought, wow, this, what a wonderful world.

You know, you develop a weird product completely out of left field. And then you go to Silicon Valley and they want it. And, you know, whatever. And so that was my one, I mean, you have to understand, even at that time, Steve Jobs was a icon and famous. And, you know, it was off-putting. And I got into an argument with him. but it still was off-putting. And so then a couple of years later, I had, well, more than a couple years later,

you'd meet Bill Gates was quite accessible. You know, he would go to conferences and you could, you know, talk with him. Yeah, no, he would sit at lunch. I mean, I remember in the PC Forum days, he was just there hanging out. He'd have lunch. He'd sit and say, hey, guys, what's up? Yeah. And he gave a talk at Roger Von Eck had a conference.

at Ricky's Hyatt House, which has been torn down since then. And he talked about, they have a very visionary speech about creating modules of software and tying together with scripting language, which is just what Frontier was. It's what I ended up developing much later. And so I was really impressed. And then I started making trips to Microsoft. I mean, that was a pretty, and they were very, I actually really liked Microsoft. I have to say that, you know, I mean, they were, I don't know.

I always, actually, like, they were red meat eaters, you know, and screw around. And when they were small, they were, they weren't, I didn't feel that they were dangerous. And I always loved working with them. And they actually tried to buy my company. They were the first. User land? No, living video. text and that was in i'm going to say 87 and uh and we had a letter of intent and uh it had the deal

gone through we would have been their first acquisition and uh wow yeah it went the value of the deal went from 10 million to 20 million while we were in due diligence and because they were just gone public and the stock was going up multiples but we didn't have the product that they want and we and they figured it out what they wanted was PowerPoint and we had a we were we pioneered presentation software on the Mac but PowerPoint came along and was uh i forgot that they bought powerpoint for yeah they bought it for 14 million dollars and so PowerPoint was going to go to semantic and we were going to go to Microsoft and and in Microsoft i got a call from frank goddette who is, I think, a Queens guy. And he was an older guy, really nice. And he had, you know, his theme was,

we're going to love you into this company, Dave. You're just going to love it here. And I was actually really excited. I'd get turned on at some of these meetings. So really, you know, it's like, whatever. And he said, Bill's going to call you in a few minutes and you're not going to like it. And that's what happened. So I ended up selling to Symantec. And I ended up getting, I was the largest shareholder in Samantha, after that deal. And then a few, a couple of years later, we went public. And yeah, I would see Bill Gates. Every time I'd go up to Microsoft, I would go in and hang out with him in his office and we'd shoot the shit. On episode 1134, Chow now founder and CEO Chris Webb explained how bad actors in the food delivery wars hurt local restaurants by leveraging their brands without permission.

And I think the poster child there is Grubhub. I think Grubhub does the, and they've been called out in recent years. It took a while to get attention to some of their business practices. Some of it now is in various cities and states is becoming illegal. So this practice of non-partner restaurants where you take any restaurant that you choose, you grab their menu online, you throw it on, you take their IP, and all of a sudden they're listed. And so before COVID hit, right before COVID hit, Grubhub actually had more non-partner restaurants on Grubhub.com and on their app than they had actually partner restaurants, right? So they had, I think that they were claiming 300,000 restaurants on their platform. The majority of those restaurants didn't know they were on and didn't

want to be on. And at some point in their life, and everyone knows Grubbub at this point. They've been around for 15 or 20 years. Those restaurants had chosen not to want to be on Grubbub, pay their fees, and everything else. And Grubbs is, you know, frankly, we don't care. We're going to take your information. We're going to list you. We're going to take your menu. We're going to mark it up. We're going to add all these fees. And we, and they've actually said on earnings call, we know this isn't good for the consumer and we know this isn't good for the restaurant. But this is good for us. And this is a game that we're playing with these other players out there. And we need to compete with the others out there.

And so we're in follow a path. To really make this clear to people who are listening who might not understand the inside baseball of this, Grubhub, instead of going through the process of getting permission from a local, let's just use a pizzeria, instead of going to Gino's or Bay Ridge Pizza in my hometown of Brooklyn, instead of going to Bay Ridge Pizza and saying, hey, would you like to be on our platform? We'll sign some documents and having that onboarding cost. They just walk in. They take the menu or they find the menu on the person's website. They put it onto their website. You call it IP, intellectual property. And then they say, we're going to market that to customers. And what they do is on the slide, I'm assuming on a technical basis,

they call in and pretend they are a customer. Correct. Sometimes what we've witnessed is I'm actually placing orders through our platform as well. So they'll take the order off their website from the customer and they either call it in as you just described or they'll just place it through ours. And sometimes they've tried to scrape various systems to submit it. Grubhub's not alone in this. There's a few other what we consider bad actors that do this. A DoorDash did this as well, right? This was an early DoorDash technique would be to just put all the restaurants online. You call them. And Postmates did this as well. Well, Postmates was originally as conceived a personal assistant who would do anything for you.

And one of those things could be as a personal assistant, go run and get your food, correct? Absolutely. And so those two companies really kind of invented this practice. They scaled very quickly because of it, I think in kind of tech terms, kind of a growth hack type maneuver. And Grubhub never did that. And ironically, Doordash and others have been moving away from this practice. And Grubhub is now playing catch up because that's kind of what they do. they tend to be beyond the ball.

On episode 1135, Density co-founder and CEO Andrew Farrah demoed their newest product, the open area sensor, which helps companies track spatial activity to follow COVID guidelines and increase efficiency. So we introduced this open area sensor

that's aerially deployed. It's a radar-based system. And I thought that it'd be kind of cool to actually just show you a live demo where we can show actual utilization of space in real time. without having to be able to do just entry count, but actual open area measurement.

And so what we're seeing looks like the nest smoke detector, like the nest aware. It's just a little square box, beautifully designed, looks like an apple product, stuck on the ceiling. It's stuck on the ceiling, yeah. And once it's mounted on the ceiling, you can start to understand sort of open space.

So let me actually jump into a, I'll show you what it sees. So a lot of times people talk about like the output, but I think if you ever deploy in any type of system, it's critically important that you actually ask what is this thing see? Because most systems are cameras. So I want to show you what this actually looks like.

John, this is John up here. It's a person sitting on a stool at a high top desk with his laptop open and office space. That's right. And you can see beneath the ground truth camera, this sort of dark three-dimensional view of dots. It looks like Tron, basically.

It looks like a grid from Tron or when you were fighting on the Millennium Falcon shooting tie fighters, it looks like the grid in which you would try to align the tie fighter into 3D space. So yes. And much and much and much like

the, much like Tron, this is all interactive. Right. So I'm actually clicking and moving around. In 3D space. And we see. a person has walked up to the other person

and they are each represented by dots that are flicking in and out of space and it knows those are humans as opposed to plants or monitors and computers, how? So the cool thing with radar is that it's not only

it's not only anonymous and it's not only extremely accurate because of the sheer number of measurements that you get. You can actually see there are a lot of measurements of what are actually movement. So as John moves through this scene, you're able to pick up on like very small movement

and that very small movement actually creates the outline of his body. You see this sort of seated motion. Yes. Or perspective. And then this separate color, there's two colors of dots indicate that there are multiple people inside the scene. This has, it's just never been possible before.

and it's never been possible because a lot of this technology was, it just wasn't available at this type of scale. Usually you see this in self-driving. So that's what the device sees. Let me show you what that means for an end customer. So here we have an overhead draft-like CAD drawing of the office space, which shows all the different offices, conference rooms, like you would see somebody unravel in a blueprint.

That's right. This is a floor plan. It is a blueprint. And customers can upload. a floor plan to understand. So as people return to offices and as people start to think about how people are using buildings and what portions of buildings they actually need, it's really hard to figure out whether or not people are too close together, if they're seated too close together,

or whether or not the number of folks inside of a conference room is exceeding the capacity. And also just the overall flow and heat map of people as they move through. So we designed a real-time floor plan. and what you're looking at is a circle with a bunch of gray grids. This gray grid is representative of what the sensor is capable of measuring. The higher it's installed, the larger its field of view, which I'm going to show you in just a second. Like the aperture of a camera. If it's low, it's got a narrow aperture.

If it's high, it's got a wide aperture, which is how satellites work, right? The higher the satellite, the more it can cover. But the more time it takes in terms of distance from the Earth to the satellite. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. So what's cool is all of this is editable, meaning you can essentially place a device onto your floor plan. And those blue dots, there are these little blue flickering dots that you'll see.

Yeah. That's me. So I'm actually showing you live and you can see me where to moving. I've installed the device above my head. And what's really cool is I can create digital spaces. got it so you can pick little zones that if somebody were to go into this zone uh you would know and it could trigger something so if somebody goes into this area yes this area is a sofa this area is a cubby you know if you have these open floor plan sometimes you got like a little beanbag area

or video game area whatever so you might want to know that two people are on those beanbags specifically that's right and so like if I move backwards I'm sitting on a couch right now yeah kind of tethered to my laptop but you can actually see that we fill up that particular digital asset and if I decide to move to a chair it should light up I can't really see my screen yeah it is we basically watch the dots walk over and sit in the chair yeah no this is this may be this may seem silly or straightforward but the reality is this is just never been possible before and the cool thing is that if we zoom out you can actually see, you see the zebra and donkey here, these are just procedurally generated.

That's the amount of time that each of these spaces were used. So if I go, if I go back to the couch, you'll actually see the zebra count went up a couple of seconds. That's madness. So literally, you now have gotten to the point where you've built a tool where anybody, the receptionist, somebody who works in facilities, can map the space themselves and then report back how many seconds this phone booth was used. That's exactly right. The best of this week in startups is brought to you by Clavio is the e-commerce marketing platform that helps brands build relationships with memorable

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