This Week in Startups - BONUS - Jason on This Week in Startups Australia

Episode Date: April 9, 2022

Jason talks about how he sees the startup landscape developing, running remote teams and more on This Week in Startups Australia with Mark Pesce. Check out TWISTA: https://twistartupsaus.com/ Subscribe to TWISTA on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/twista-this-week-in-startups-australia/id951368363

Hey, everybody, hey everybody. It's Saturday. We don't publish this week in startups on Saturday. But today we will do a special this week in Startups, Australia. Yes, my good friend, Mark Pesci, has been hosting a version of this show in Australia for 10 seasons now. I joined him for the first episode of season number 10. It's a great interview. If I do say so myself, I'm a guest.

So we decided to post it here. You can do a search in your podcast player for this week in Startups, Australia, and listen to his great interviews, especially if you're a VC or you're an angel investor looking to invest in Australia like I have. It's a great way to meet new companies and understand the trends going on down under. Giday, this is Mark Peshy and welcome to the premiere of Series 10 of this week in Startups Australia. In Series 10, Twista has a singular focus. We're identifying and sharing the story of Australia's world-changing startups. The startups that when they go from zero to one, really,

do change the world. And not just the startups, but the founders, the investors, Australia all over is stepping up with some of the brightest sparks working hard to change the world. So come on the journey, which begins, as it has for the last several years, in a deep, wide-ranging conversation with Mr. Angel Jason Calacanus. We'll take a look back at his scarily accurate predictions for how the pandemic would change work and startups forever. Jason shows us his psychic side on this episode of this week in Startups Australia. This week in Startups Australia is sponsored by user testing. With user testing, you'll understand it from your customers' perspective.

Get real-time feedback real fast. Put yourself in your customer's shoes. Visit usertesting.com slash Twista for a free trial. User testing, real human insight. This week in Startups, Australia is also sponsored by Zendesk. Zendesk helps startups build lasting, customer experiences from the ground up with the Zendesk for Startups program. Learn more at Zendesk.com slash Twista.

This week in Starts, Australia, is sponsored by Our Crowd. Our Crowd finds companies with the greatest growth potential and brings them to you. They believe in their deals and invest in them to. Join the fastest growing venture capital investment community at our crowd.com slash Twista. Every year, we kick off the new series. of this week in Startups Australia. In conversation with the patron saint of this podcast,

legendary angel investor Jason Callicanis. Jason, welcome back to Twista. Oh, it's just my pleasure to be here again, and it's one of the great joys of my life that you decided to create this podcast for Australia as a sister podcast to This Week in Startups' main channel. And it's been great to see the audience grow. And my God, I can't wait now that COVID is over

to come back down under and see everybody. So it led perfectly into the first question, which is, how's it going over there in the U.S. right now? You know, it's a very interesting series of events that occurred. You know, we had this very cantankerous debate between our 50 states in which some decided we can live with COVID. Some decided we needed to be sheltering in place like you did in, I think, a lot of Australia. And so it led to this big debate.

luckily Amacron variant solved that for everybody because by all accounts it's less deadly and it spreads very quickly so I got after two years of trying to avoid it I got COVID on Christmas and I was fine I sneezed twice

my wife was like Jade was like you have COVID and I take the tat I was like no I don't I take the test I have COVID and you know what it was a two out of ten on a cold scale so I was one of the lucky ones of course I'm triple vaxed and now it's very strange we went overnight from you know, being in this, you know, fear and cantankerous, you know, kind of situation to,

everybody basically saying, okay, it's over, we're going to live with it. Someone who's in the startup scene in Australia said that he listened to the podcast that we did two years ago just when this had started. And he said, Mark, it is eerie. How much Jason got right about this. And when we started off, so this is, again, two years ago, you were in lockdown in California. I was in lockdown in Australia. Yeah. And so, you know, it's just like one of these things that as entrepreneurs, you got to really try to keep an even keel. Not too high, not too low. And then you get into a crisis situation. And now you're a wartime CEO. You're a wartime president. You're a wartime consigiary, whatever it is. And that's what I am. I'm in the conigularia in this.

I'm trying to give advice to founders. And in that case, there is a silver lining. Obviously, people don't want to touch food and the sanitary kind of conditions matter. So there's some positive things there. But you're going to have to really slow down expenses and wait this out. And then we had another business, you know, like Steasy, which is online dance lessons, or Calm.com, meditation, or FitBod, workout app for when you're working out at home and you don't have a lot of equipment. So those things, all of a sudden you see trials go up. You were talking about, again, this permanent shift in behaviors where companies that were favoring being able to do things online so that's Steezy, that's calm, were really going to come out of the pandemic shining.

And it looks like there, we have really seen a permanent shift of behaviors. And you've called it. Yeah. I mean, it was fairly obvious to me that we've all watched as remote work was percolating. And, you know, telehealth was percolating. And as investors, you get to see entrepreneurs say, well, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do a telemedicine thing. I'm going to do therapy online.

I'm going to do whatever visits online. nutritional counseling, and they're kind of like stuck in the mud. And it's like, I wonder why this is stuck in the mud. It's like, well, doctors don't want to do it. Patients don't want to do it. But then, you know, we humans are such adaptable creatures. It's why we took over the planet with these giant brains, consciousness, all this wonderful operating system we've been given.

And sure enough, it was like, well, I can't go to my doctor. So therefore, my doctor's going to get Zoom. My doctor's going to get a webcam. And then, okay, your doctor's got a webcam. and he or she is like, oh, well, this webcam stinks. I got to get a better setup. Oh, I need to get an ethernet cable. So all of the things that were required for us to do a beautiful podcast like this,

every single person in the world do. So now therapists and doctors are more than happy to do things online. And they're like, you know what? It's kind of better we do this meeting online because then it frees up this time for me and I can have more time with patients who actually need my help instead of letting them sit in the audience. So everything got pulled forward. and then we now are in, which I think is the sort of most interesting part about this, is a big standoff.

Some people want to return to how it was. Some people are like, this is pretty great. And now we have the renegotiation. One of the other things that you predicted, Jason, was that the money printers would start up and we would be getting something very close to a universal basic income. You know, there's going to have to be massive stimulus poured into every economy. And so in America, they're just going to give UBI basically to everybody. They're just going to send everybody a check. And if you don't want the check, you don't have to cash it.

If you cash it and you make a lot of money in the next year on taxes, you've got to pay it back. It's pretty straightforward. And so there's going to be some very common sense stuff like that that will occur. And then on top of it, you know, I think we'll see bailouts for the companies. You know, you said there's going to be massive stimulus poured into every economy. So did we get that right? And if we did, did we unwittingly launch ourselves into an inflationary cycle as a result? Yeah, it's pretty clear in the United States that we did exactly that.

We were scared. It looked like the economy was going to collapse. It felt very similar to those moments of fear with the real estate bubble bursting in 2008. Dot-com burst in 2000 or, sadly, after 9-11, where, oh, my God, humanity is over. one of the things I've learned in this lifetime is, again, we're pretty resilient creatures. And no matter what gets thrown at us, we seem to survive it. And then we come out stronger. But people were scared.

We threw a bunch of money into the economy. We said, hey, we're not going to kick people out of their homes. If they can't work, we can't cut off unemployment. We can't evict people. And we got this big lesson in, well, we have a money printing machine, so let's print money and see what happens. Unfortunately, we probably in the United States went too far. and now we see crazy inflation.

And then that's combined with, we didn't let people immigrate into the country because borders were closed reasonably. And then now we're coming out of it. American companies are really strong. They're run really well. We've got incredible efficiency and we have 11 million job openings.

And then a group of people who said, I'm going to take that money and start trading on Robin Hood, experiment with crypto, try a different lifestyle, maybe move to a city where it's uh or you know move out of the city and have a lower um cost per month those people now have decided hey maybe the rat race going into a city every day commuting maybe i'm happier if i'm just you know by a lake somewhere or by the beach and i'll put in 20 hours as a consultant you

know basically what you figured out 20 years before all of us and now so the world is figured out mark pesci's lifestyle if only i managed to get away with 20 hours a week of work well you're opting into it, but you did figure out lifestyle matters. And so now that lifestyle matters, we have this wicked combination of companies are thriving. There's a lot of money in the system. And we just have to get people to come back to work at some point or allow people to immigrate back into the United States. I don't know the exact situation in Australia. But we have, I think, 5 million people looking for jobs, 11.6 million jobs were open. You've got people switching jobs. So there's a lot of chaos in there. And there's some geography and skills mismatches there.

People might have jobs in cities. We might have jobs that people don't have the skills yet for. But anyway, super vibrant economic recovery going on where wages are raising like crazy in the United States. You know, you and I have talked about how far ahead Australia was with minimum wages and a living wage. Well, guess what? The United States, we got there dragged kicking and screaming. And all of a sudden, Amazon's like, we'll pay for your associate's degree.

we'll pay you $15, $20 an hour. What is it going to take for you guys to come back to work? And Uber's were like, oh, Uber can never be profitable. Lyft can never profitable. Well, you know what? You add $3 or $4 to the cost of a lift, and then 10% of the drivers come back. You add 7, 50% of the drivers come back. So we're just in this great, what I call the great renegotiation.

People are going to come back to work. They're going to need to pay them. Here's the thing. For almost all of the time that you and I have been deeply involved in startup plan, right? There has basically been zero inflation, right? We are now entering a period of historically high, not incredibly high, not hyperinflation, but definitely high inflation because all of that money has been pumped in because there is so many jobs chasing so few people now, right? What does this mean if I am a startup entrepreneur

and I am now in a financial environment that I have never seen and none of my peers have have ever had to experience, and none of my investors have ever had to experience. How do I deal with these inflationary pressures? What are we learning about that? Yeah, so because it was a free money type environment, large funds were raised, and people suspended disbelief, gave people a lot of credit for their vision in a startup. And there were people who raised money for their seed round, their Series A, who really didn't have to prove much. And now what's happening is, People who have the dollars to invest are looking at their portfolio and saying, okay, what companies are default alive, as Paul Graham would say, they're profitable?

What companies are growing briskly and can easily get to profitability? And then which ones are not those two things? We put it in the bucket of other. In other words, searching for product, market fit, trying to get customers to pay for something in the laboratory. Well, if you're not profitable and you don't have a clear path, and you don't have a clear path to profitability, and you raised at a high valuation,

you're going to need to roll up your sleeves and get to work. It's time to sharpen the pencils and really say, okay, and you see this at startups. They're overfunded. People are having fun. It's great. And the founders focused on the original business, plus two side businesses.

They started a fund. They're speaking at a conference. They started their own conference. They're doing a million different things. And the core thing is not cranking yet. Well, guess what? Now it's time to be an essentialist and say, we have to make the core thing work. We have to get to profitability.

And now we have to prove it. It's not about promise anymore, Mark. It's about performance. And in a hot market, you can sell promise. You can sell the vision and sell promise. In a market like this where people are clenching up and getting tight, you've really got to lean into performance. And we're also now, because things like bonds were never competitive in terms of their yield to what perhaps investing in a fund would be that that money was always going into a fund that someone was raising

rather than going into the bond market. And that calculus is now, at least for the short term, is now changing. So does that mean there's going to be less money coming in than we've seen over the last several years? So this is the great irony of venture capital. Funds are raised in an up market and then deployed in the following three, four, or five years. So it was a go-go market, and how many people do you know who were, you know, a VP at a great company? They were vice president at, you know, Canva or something or at Lassian. And now they're a venture partner somewhere or they're an associate or a partner where they started their own fund. I mean, I used to come to Australia.

There were three funds. Now there's many more. And so the good news, the silver lining is those funds are raised from rich people. those rich people are committed as LPs, limited partners. They cannot back down on that commitment without losing their entire stake. So if you said, I'm a rich person, I'm putting $100,000, $500,000 into this fund, and you put the first $25K in, if you don't put the next $75 in, you'll lose the first $25. So it's pretty punitive.

What that means is the funds that have been raised will be sitting there looking at whatever the outcome is of this great shake out. And that means they will be able to cherry pick which winners they want to bet on and there will be light at the end of the tunnel. But only for those who prove that they have a path to profitability, they have discipline, and their burn rate is not so crazy that they're literally don't have enough fuel in the plane to make it, you know, to a landing strip. And so if your burn is really high and you raised money really easily, that's what you need to do is you need to switch gears, right? and just change your style. We're talking to Jason Calicanis. When Twister returns, we're going to take a look at the huge changes to how we work. Twista is delighted to welcome back user testing as a sponsor. Experience what your customer experiences with user testing.

Whether you're launching a new product, prototype, or marketing campaign, you'll get video feedback straight from the people who you want to reach most. The user testing human insight platform lets you understand it all from their. perspective. And it allows you to target your exact audience, ask any question or request to perform tasks, and most valuably get a window into their world. Unlike focus groups, which can take weeks or even months to deliver results, with user testing, you get to see real reactions and hear real opinions really fast in real time at the speed business demands. Very quickly, you get insights into what's working and what's not. So you can adjust your message,

refine your UI and understand exactly how people are responding to and interacting with your product, service, or brand. The result, you feel what your customer feels so you can build the best experience imaginable. For a free trial, visit usertesting.com slash Twista. User testing, real human insight. Welcome back to Twista and in our series 10 opener. We're talking with Jason Callicanis. We're revisiting a bit of history and some predictions that Jason made that turned out to be absolutely dead on. And this one he made in our show a year ago. The biggest change, which I had fought and underestimated, was the work from home revolution. In America, we had a couple of little pockets of innovation there.

You had 37 signals, which makes base camp. You had WordPress and Matt Mullenweg and intercom and a handful of companies that I would say were quixotic, weird, or a butchew. obviously, you know, a billion dollar, multi-billion dollar company like WordPress is not boutique, but it was generally considered like this weird thing over here. Well, when 100% of people are forced to get a setup with a proper microphone and lighting, a light ring and, you know, put their ethernet cable in for the first time to their computer and they didn't even know they had an ethernet port or an ethernet hub in their house, but they, you know, ran that 50-foot cable to make Zoom work properly. Once that happened, we saw actually that work from home technology

does work. And managing people remotely does work, if a hundred 100% of people buy into it. So it's almost like a prisoner's dilemma where if you were a work from home employee, you would be a second class citizen in most companies because you'd have some conference or people would go for a walk. They'd make business decisions and you weren't involved in it because you were in Boise, Idaho. Now, when you get on a Zoom, the CEO gets a little square box and next to them is the lowest

ranking person and everybody in between. So it's created this level playing field. And then, and this is where it gets even a little bit, it gets a little bit marauding, but I do think some CEOs looked at this and said, wait a second. If we can hire people anywhere, the 30, 40% premium we pay in Silicon Valley means we can get a third employee for every two and we can lower salaries 30%. Oh, and we're spending this much on facilities and space. It's our number three line item or number two.

We can reduce that 50%. Oh, and now there's nowhere left to hide. And that's the final piece, which is if you are not producing or you are producing really a lot of work, In a work from home environment, a remote work environment, proper management is forced to do their job, which is not evaluate people on their culture, you know, quotient or how good they are at meetings or water cooler or other performative stuff. You then have to look at what was the work that was done. So you don't, you get no points for bringing in donuts or making everybody laugh in the cafeteria or whatever. All that stuff is gone.

It's just what work did you get done? And when you take out commuting, which is two or three hours a day here in the States, we saw, I think, a bargain happen, a grand bargain, which is you get to work however you want, wherever you want. We're going to take those two or three hours and you keep one, we get one. And people are working more. Jason, that really does seem to describe what just happened. Yeah, I was very skeptical that great companies could be built remote. And I think this was a bit of a prisoner's dilemma. Everybody has to adopt this in order for.

for it to work. So if you were a company and 10% of your employees were remote, we all know that experience where it's like, yeah, there's a couple of weird people who work from home. And it's like, are they on the call? And they're like, hey, I can't see the presentation. And you're on the conference from working. And that person's a second class citizen. What is magical about what happened was everybody on the call. When I do my staff meeting on Wednesdays at launch, we went from, you know, I don't know, seven people on the call to 22 people now. We've grown, we've tripled in size during the pandemic years. What we realized was, what I realized, I'm the same postage size stamp as everybody else. And the managing director and the person who just started this week as an associate or a

researcher are the same size. We're all equal billing. We're all have our headphones on. and we all write down with a writing first culture using Notion or Cota or docs, whatever you choose to use, people are now being judged strictly on their output, not the theatrics and the performance, the performative nature of in-office work. And that is the magic. We basically have a system at our company. I wrote a blog post about it called the S-O-D-E-O-D, and it was start of day, end of day. I had to adapt as a manager.

I was a great in-person manager. Take people to lunch. I make people laugh. I brew coffee for people. I filled the dishwasher. I was that guy. Make a joke. Hey, take people for a walk and talk.

What I learned about remote work is you need self-directed people who GSD get stuff done. And then you need to write down very clearly as a manager what your expectation is. And you have to have a right first culture like Google did. I added all these things. And basically in Slack, I said to people, when you start your day, just write three bullet points in the general channel or so. Shouldn't take more than five minutes over your first cup of coffee, what you're looking to get done today.

And then at the end of the day, you get to turn off and punch out. You reply back to yourself with what you got to accomplish. You put links, you put any blockers, things you're struggling with, and feel free to comment on other people's. And all of a sudden, you know, eight out of ten people are thriving. Two people are complaining. They don't want to do it. And it's like, okay, now we know who the professional managers are who maybe aren't pulling the same weight.

And now we know who are the people who maybe were not getting enough credit. All of a sudden, you see people with 20 items at the end of the day that they got done. And then they're linking to their notion or CODA or Google Docs page with the detail of the work. So all of a sudden, I had to remove the performative nature of work and really get focused as a manager and as a leader on, did I describe the goal of the company correctly? Did I describe, you know, what your job responsibilities are? And then I adapted again and said, listen, if you don't feel good about your SOD and EOD, or we do an EOW at the end of the week and an SOWW. So Monday morning's SOWS start a week and Friday end of week. What it did for people is it gave them permission to come to the boss and say, I don't have clear instructions of what success is. Can we have a conversation of what makes me successful here? You hired me to do X.

I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. And I think there's a lot of people in corporate America who were coming to their desk, checking their email, reading the Huffington Post, listening to a podcast, doing some online shopping. People talk about people at home not working. It was the opposite. People coming to offices were literally sitting there going, I hope somebody doesn't realize that I'm doing two hours of work a day. And the people working from home were overworking because they're like, I've got to keep this job.

If I'm going to work at home, I've got to work twice as hard. So long way of saying a lot more thoughtfulness. and a lot more recognition of the people who are getting stuff done. And then the magic happens. Somebody would leave the company and we'd say, hey, we have to replace that position. I'd say, okay, great, give me their EOWs, their end of weeks. They're a little bullpoint list of what they got done. Get me the last five weeks, remove any dupes and make us the big list.

And then management will sit and look at what they were doing and decide either, do we break that up? Do we make it two jobs? Do we just not rehire that person and give it to other people? Do we automate it? Do we outsource it? So this automation and a little bit more ownership is what the future is. And teams are going to be lean, more efficient, people are going to be happier,

but they're going to also have loneliness, and there's some downside, which we can get into. Here's the thing. People are working remotely when they can and where they can. I've got to tell you, my sister, in February, quit her job, got a new remote job, sold her house in California in 22 hours for hundreds of thousands above the price that she put, bought a house in Hawaii, moved the family, has been there now a couple of weeks, and is loving life because she can work and then go down the street to the beach and go swim in a coral reef. And, you know, you're talking about the great renegotiation. We also hear about this term the great resignation.

You said, and I quote, I think for people who are smart, it's going to become the secret and the differentiator, the secret weapon for companies. Yeah, I mean, think it through. You're super talented. You have 10 job offers. And five of them say you need to get on a bus from San Francisco, go down the 101, cross over, go to Cooper Tino and sit in some big spaceship building. and it takes you two hours to get to your desk and then two hours to get home, and they want you to do an hour of lunch with somebody. So five of your 10-hour days is commuting and other waste of time, and you're like, you know what, I could just bang out all this work in four or five hours

and we'll both be happy because I move the ball forward for your company. So herein lies the challenge. Netflix, Facebook, and Google are trying to put their feet down and say, come back to the office. Startups are saying, I need to fill this position. I'm running out of runway. I don't have the luxury of saying to a developer or a great sales executive or an amazing marketer, I'm going to dictate you have to come to my mothership and go to the cafeteria and eat the $27 steak and the laundry is going to be done for you. I just need the job done. And so this is where the balance of power now has flipped to the talent, not the management.

And that's it. It's game over. You're seeing Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and Sundar all kind of put their hands up and say, I give up. We're going to try three days a week. And they're kind of like cringing and like, is this going to work or not? Newsflash, it's not going to work. It's the five stages, right? It's denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Yeah, they're in the bargaining phase right now. And what's going to happen is, I can't wait,

Yum, Yum for me, because here's the thing, a talented person who's in their career, you know, maybe they're in the 30s or 40s or 50s. They're just crushing it. People now working into their 60s, you know, and looking great and young. They're going to be like, make 100,000, 125, 150. It doesn't matter. I'm not optimizing for that. People are now optimizing for culture, joy, fulfillment. We just, the pandemic, I don't know if I can say the F word, but it effed with people's minds, emotions. They all did a deep introspection. Am I happy or not? I'm locked in this cage. I can't leave my house. I'm in some weird, gilded cage. What actually makes me happy? What will bring me joy in my coming years? and I'm going to optimize for that.

And if you're an employer and you don't optimize for your employee's joy, you're going to lose great employees. So I now have flipped everything. I want everybody to come to work. And you know me, I'm a hardcore guy. I was like, let's work hard.

I'm kind of a drill sergeant, like samurai. Now I'm just like, how are you feeling today? Are you looking forward to coming and crushing it with me at work? We're going to make a great podcast. We're going to invest in companies. I want people to feel happy.

I don't want people to come to work with dread. And I think all employers are going to have to think about this. Because now that work is global and anybody can work from anywhere, what that means is the geographic constraints no longer give you any authority over people. Like if Google doesn't want to let a person be remote who lives in Napa, they're just going to go work at a startup that does let them work. from a vineyard or your friend from Hawaii. It's game over.

All right. You're listening to this week and start Australia. We will be right back. Twista would like to welcome new series 10 sponsor, Zendesk. The fastest growing companies have great products and great customer service. Zendesk helps startups build lasting customer experiences from the ground up with their Zendesk for startups program. You build the great product. And Zendesk will help you build great customer experiences that make your customers.

come back. Apply for the Zendesk for startups program to get their industry-leading customer service software free for six months. You'll also get access to Zendesk's community of startup founders and partners, plus dedicated onboarding guidance and support. Zendesk has everything you need to deliver the amazing customer experiences that will make your product a success. To learn more about Zendesk for startups, visit Zendesk.com slash Twista. If you want to stare into the coal face of what Jason calls the great negotiation or maybe the great renegotiation, just go into the CBD in Melbourne or in Sydney. And if you've been there, you'll notice that things are very different than they were. And not just on Mondays and Fridays, which seem to be the days that everyone has agreed people can work from home.

Pretty much every other day, the CBD is not what it was. It is not the buzzing center. It is not the place that people are irresisting. drawn to in order to be able to work, to connect, to make deals, to transact, to make money, to make their way in the world. That is always what the story of the CBD has been in Australia, and particularly Melbourne and Sydney. And it is clear that after two years, that has gone. And although people seem to believe that it will come back, I want to point out a little bit of brutal economic reality. Although there are,

massive amounts of real estate that are available in the inner city, anything that's straight facing, anything that was a sandwich shop or light retail or whatever it was, they didn't make it through the last two years. Those are all gone. Those spaces are all up for lease. And yet, at exactly the same moment, when you'd think that that was kind of the sign of an economy that might have raging 10 or 15% unemployment, we know that in the next quarter, the unemployment rate will be 3.75%, the lowest it will have been in 48 years. So we're presented with a real paradox because we did believe that the city and the inner city in particular was a sure sign of our economic vitality, that if it was thriving, then the nation was thriving. And the pandemic decoupled that arrangement.

that is now no longer the case. And now that it is no longer the case, there's no real reason to believe that it will ever be the case again. Employers simply cannot order their employees back into the office. They're trying it. It's not working. And they don't have leverage because, again, with an unemployment rate of 3.75%, someone can always say, I'm going to find a better deal elsewhere.

You know, the RBA is advising people that if they want to raise what they really need, to do is change their jobs. And so now people are positively incentivized to find the best set of conditions that work for them. And that probably doesn't include jumping on the train or getting in traffic for two hours every day so they can go sit at a desk in the middle of the city. If we had looked at 2019 and said, you know, by 2022, the CBDs in Australia will be basically irrelevant.

People would have thought that you were absolutely mad. But it took two full years of abandoning our CBDs to be able to find out that, in fact, business is not dependent on that. Yes, we absolutely still need to meet. Yes, we absolutely still need to press the flesh. Yes, teams work better when they can all be in the same place, breathing the same, hopefully clean air. All of those things continue to be true, but none of that means that we need to be there

every single day, all together, all the time in our CBDs. We don't really know what that means yet. But the startups that figure out even a little bit of that will be some of the leading startups in Australia in this decade. We'll be back in a moment. Twista is very happy to welcome our crowd as a sponsor for Series 10. All around the world, tech companies are innovating and driving returns for investors. Our crowd analyzes companies across the global private

a market, including Australia, where startups brought in a record $4.2 billion in investments. Our crowd identifies those companies with the greatest growth potential and then brings them to you. From personalized medicine to cybersecurity to robotics, quantum computing, and more. Our crowd identifies innovators so you can invest when growth potential is greatest. Early. Our crowd is the fastest growing venture capital investment community. sophisticated investors have already invested over $2 billion in growing tech companies. And Our Crowd has skin in the game. They invest in their portfolio companies and use their extensive networks to help those startups succeed.

As a sophisticated investor, you can truly diversify your portfolio with early investments in innovative private market companies at OurCrow. Join the fastest growing venture capital investment community at OurCrow.com slash twist. Individual results may vary. There's no guarantee that past performance will be indicative of future results. Invest wisely. Although that was an amazing conversation with Jason Callagannis, that was really only half of the conversation. And in an upcoming episode, we will bring you the rest of what Jason had to say

about what the future looks like for startups, for Silicon Valley, and the world of the 2020s. Thanks to Twista sponsors, user testing Zendesk and Our Crowd. Big thanks to Jason Calicanis for making time to come on to our show. This show was written and produced by Mark Pesci and beautifully mixed by Luke Station. Come visit our website at This Week in Startups.A.U. It's got everything. It's got all the shows, all the interviews, all the photos, all the links to all the stories. So check it out at this week in startups.com.

We'll be back next week with our first news special of 2022. And with a big spending federal budget just handed down, there's a lot of important details in there for startups. That's coming up next week. Until then, this is Mark Pesci, thanking you for listening.