This Week in Startups - Breaking down Basecamp’s tumultuous week, politics at work & more | E1208

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

Jason weighs in on Basecamp's ban of political discussion at work (10:57), the ensuing employee exodus (22:40), shares his policy for his companies (26:32), answers a listener's question about how to surround yourself with great people (40:09), and more! Pod Notes: http://bit.ly/e1208Tnotes

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And Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd for free at O-U-R-C-O-W-D.com slash twist. Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. It's another episode of This Week in Startups, My World tour continues, and by world tour, I mean U.S. tour, Austin, Miami, and now my hometown, New York City. Go Knicks, baby. 12 and 3 in the last, 12 and 13. Last 13 games, I'm super excited about my

Knicks. And I'm super excited about today's show, because I want to talk to you about something that has exploded over the last week on the internet. And of course, everybody needs a final ruling. And as the chairman of the internet, I'm going to give my final ruling. We're going to button this all up and end the conversation at Basecamp right now. For those of you who don't know what Basecamp is, it's a piece of software that I think is about 15 or 20 years old. It's web-based. It's run by Friends of the Show, David Hammeyer Hansen and Jason Freed. They've been on this podcast multiple times. I had two classic episodes with DHH, which is how he goes, David Hanmeyer Hansen. He's at DHH on Twitter. If you want to follow.

him. He's really smart. I love talking to him. We disagree about 50%. We agree about 50%. And the stuff that we disagree on is important stuff. And Jason Freed is a quiet guy who's super considered, obviously very smart. They're great entrepreneurs. They built a money printing business, tens of millions of dollars a year in their project management software. People are absolutely in love with it. And they basically had the greatest civil war we have ever seen inside of a company. And by civil war, I mean, a third of the company walked out. And when I say walked out, I mean quit. Not walked out to the courtyard and said, we're not going to take it anymore. I mean resigned and took a huge pay package. I believe three, four, five, I think three to six months was the pay package. Now, how did this all go on?

Jason Freed released a public memo on April 26th. This is in the year of 2021. If you're watching this as a historical document and trying to figure out exactly how insane the culture wars got during the 2020s. And this memo entitled The Changes at Bates Camp essentially banned all political speech inside the company. Now, if this sounds familiar, it's because I did an episode on this because Coinbase did the same thing. Coinbase 2 was faced with a never-ending debate on their Slack channels about important issues

in the world. There are very important issues in the world. We 100% all agree on them. All of us, all of us agree that George Floyd should not have been treated the way he was treated by that police officer. Some people might say it was murder. I think majority of people would say it was murder, including myself. Other people would say it was just over the top. I believe they would be wrong, grossly wrong.

But nobody wants to see racism, murder. horrible policing. Nobody wants to see the Capitol destroyed and people scared out of their minds by a bunch of, you know, deranged Trump supporters who decided they were going to terrorize the Capitol on January 6th. Was it an insurrection? Was it not? As you can see, just me even trying to summarize these charged topics gets me into hot water. I have to be careful. Oh, my God. Can I say it perfectly right? What you're experiencing right now, as I explain these things to you, is what is happening inside of companies. Now, why is this happening inside of companies?

And did it always happen? Yeah, sure, people talk about politics at work, or maybe even religion at times. But generally, before, let's just say, the woke era, the last 10 or 20 years, it was a tradition to not talk about politics and to not talk about religion at work. It was considered a road to nowhere.

It was just considered something you didn't do. Now, times are different. People want to see change in the world. I get that. There is something else that's occurred. Electronic communications. Everybody in their office has a product called Slack. Some people use HipChat. They might use Microsoft Teams, but you have email lists and Slack. And everybody knows when you try to talk about something, that is important. You don't do it on SMS, I message, WhatsApp, AOL messenger in the past. Anything that's important, you pick up the phone and you call somebody, or better yet, you go get a cup of coffee and you hash it out face to face, where empathy is on 100 as opposed to on zero. There is zero empathy occurring when you're typing on text. This is why Twitter is a giant brouhaha, a Donnybrook, chaos. So back to base camp. They decide no more political, societal discussions on the company's account. But they're very clear that you can do that on your own channels. If you want to create a signal group, a telegram group, you can do that. They also said, enough with the paternalistic benefits. I think the word paternalistic means like daddy's giving you something like or mommy. And we're not going to baby you. So the health

and wellness stipends. They used to give people farmers market stipends. I mean, that was the level of virtue signaling and wokeness at Basecamp, which is why this story is so notable. Basecamp was considered the woke person's startup, the most enlightened person's startup, if you will, because they would give you massages and they would give you money to get a massage. And they would literally give you massages at work. They would also give you farmers market stipend, and all that kind of stuff. They then said, you know what? We're going to stop doing that as well.

We're just going to give you money. And you can decide what you want to do. Because they started to realize maybe there should be a line between what we do at work and our personal lives. By the way, that's how the majority of people in the world feel. The majority of people want to go to work. They want to do good work. They want it to be rewarding.

And they want to go home to their families, friends, loved ones and have some balance in their life. We all know that. It's just common sense. Most people do not want to go to work and have political discussions, period, end of story. Now, that doesn't mean political discussions are not important. It does not mean that people shouldn't have the right to do it. The problem is the chaos that can ensue in a very polarized time like the Trump era. And so they also said, we're not going to have any more committees, and they disbanded this longstanding group of managers called the small council, which apparently is a game of Thrones reference for a small group of people on that show who decide things. And they don't want people dwelling

on past decisions, and they wanted people to get back to making calls, explaining why, once and moving on. So just some general rules of the road. None of them seemed too oppressive, in fact, quite the opposite. They seem totally reasonable. And they ask people to not forget why they were here, here being the workplace, which is, we make project management. I'm quoting here, team communication email software. We are not a social impact company. A coinbase, if you remember, and I think I did an episode about it and talked about it on this podcast, that episode was a similar kind of philosophy, or they came to the same conclusion, let's say, that this was basically stopping people from completing the company's mission. And there was the risk of ruin. There was the chance that

Coinbase could collapse. Now, Coinbase became one of the greatest successes in the history of Silicon Valley and certainly one of the top five successes of the last super cycle in tech. In other words, Airbnb, Uber, Coinbase are the three most valuable companies, I think in the last 10 years. We probably include Zoom in that. And, yeah, Snowflake. So there's been, you know, five companies worth over $50 billion from the last super cycle of tech, of tech, 10-year sort of super cycle, is how this generally happens. I love Squarespace. Squarespace is such a fantastic company.

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I got really frustrated during this pandemic. I was trying to figure out what do I do? How do I get companies funded? I'm going to start this remote demo day.com. I told my team, make me a beautiful website. When I say beautiful website, they think Squarespace, it took longer to write the copy than to make a beautiful website. I'll be totally honest.

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Congratulations on making the best product in the business. And thank you for your support of this weekend startups for years. I mean, it really does mean a lot to me. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. So then a day later, and you can just see how exhausting this is to even summarize it. Imagine you were in the company. D.H. release his own memo, and he's a great writer. They've written many books there.

He's a great communicator. And I, like, if you said to me, hey, want to have lunch with D.H. they'd be like, oh, it's going to be a great, interesting lunch. Oh, you want to go for a hike with Jason Freed? Absolutely. Great, interesting individual. Because that's how I was brought up. Not sure how you were brought up. But I was brought up that people who would think differently than you, great, go break bread with them, go for a walk with them, do a walk and talk and learn and expand your consciousness. But for some reason, there's a group of people who believe today that everybody must think like them. And everybody has to spend every waking hour talking about

Trump or other issues, the insurrection or, you know, police violence, you know, all this kind of stuff is really important for society. But when you're getting paid for eight hours of work a day, the company still needs to exist so everybody can pay their rent, right? This is just common sense. It's just pure common sense. So the internet exploded after DHS, DHS memo. And he said there are many places, I'm quoting here, to be involved, exposed, and engaged in conversations and in parentheses, political or societal. Basecamp shouldn't be one of those places. Think that's quite reasonable. We're not saying you can't have opinions, not saying you can't talk about it, but maybe bringing it to work. So I tried to come to this with a very, very open mind. Maybe I have a blind spot. Maybe I should

think about this. That's how I always come to. Anytime there's a big issue, I try to really just open up my mind. I look at what my existing beliefs are and I say, which one of these beliefs is still true? Which one of them was never true? I really try to do some self-examination like that. And I do it typically on Twitter or this podcast. The internet exploded with people, meaming it, dunking on Base Camp. Because Base Camp, let's be honest, they were the virtue signaling of all virtue signaling companies. They literally wrote a book, Rework, telling other companies how they should work. And they were right. They told companies they should do remote work and it would be better for employees.

And they were right. Not only were they virtual signaling, they were often right about their ideas. Again, smart, smart individuals. Both also happen to be white males. So I don't know if that matters or not, but they happen to be two smart white males who started a company. I don't know if they're gay or straight or asexual. I'll leave that out for now. Twitter was having a slow news day.

there is no more Trump to obsess over. So this all went supernova. Casey Newton, who is now a substacker and he has a really cool product called Platformer. I am a subscriber. He explains some of the inner workings of all this. And what this was all over, it turns out, was there was a discussion over an old list that was kept by some employees called Best Names Ever List, which tracked funny names, which were often rude and sometimes a bit racist. So you probably know these because if you've seen the Simpsons, they do this all the time, right? They make fun of names and they call Mo the bartender. They ask him for a name. I'm not going to say them here. I don't want to be canceled for repeating something on the Simpsons. I'm joking.

I just, it's just a stupid 12 year old name. We used to do this all the time in Brooklyn. We would call random people in the phone book when the phone book existed and we would make a funny joke about their name. Like literally, this is what 12-year-old kids do. So some 12-year-old kids at Basecamp started a list. The list was not targeted at any specific group, but everybody on the list obviously could be affiliated with certain groups. These were not aliens. These were people, you know, they weren't all from Mars. These were people who came from different ethnicities.

Therefore, you could take the list of joke names and then take a list of who could be offended. by them in the company and you could take those two lists and you could draw lines between them and say you should be offended by this one because it's of this ethnic origin or you might be offended by this one because it's got this religious origin. Oh, it's so exhausting. I know. Two or three stupid people doing juvenile things turn the whole company upside down. And now I got to talk about it on this podcast instead of interviewing another founder. But there's some lessons here, so I think it's worth it. The list made some base camp employees feel uncomfortable. obviously somebody's going to be offended by everything.

This was in fact offensive, juvenile, and stupid. To which D.H. David Hammeyer Hansen admitted and he said he owned it. There was some awareness, I'm quoting now, there was some awareness at the time within the company that the list had existed and it wasn't acted upon. That is squarely on Jason in my record. So they should have stopped this.

They didn't. People were blowing off steam. They did something that might have been totally acceptable 20 or 30 years ago on The Simpsons or in a company. And it's not. Great. Society's evolving. So Jason and DHS are evolving. They're thinking to themselves, hey, could my behavior have been better here. Yes, my behavior could have been better. I should have stopped the list in its track, which is what we're going to do right now. He said the list in itself is just a gross violation of the trust. It's just wrong in all sorts of fundamental ways. which is what I just said, which is what you probably think. No place for that at work. It's juvenile, stupid. If your 12-year-olds came into the room and they started making fun of somebody's name, you'd be like, yeah, that's a funny joke, whatever. You might laugh and you just be like, okay, those are 10-year-old kids doing stupid stuff. You know, what's also a little prenicious about this is that they were mocking their own customers.

So that was, you know, even a little bit lower class or insensitive. but then somebody decided, I'm assuming in a slack room or could have been email, to take this to another level. And they referenced the anti-defamation league's pyramid of hate. It happens to be that on the pyramid of hate, if you've never seen it, the top of the pyramid of hate is genocide. Okay, we can all agree that trying to extinguish a certain group of people from the planet is the worst level of hate. objectively, that seems reasonable. It also happens that the bottom of the pyramid of hate is making fun of somebody's name. So now, remember I said before, empathy gets strained when you are on electronic communications. And if somebody's hurt, now they're going to express that

hurt, not on a walk, not over a cup of coffee, but they're going to put it in a chat room. so they decide to blow this thing up and say, look, here's the pyramid of hate. We just started by making fun of people's names. So obviously, we're on the road to genocide. Pretty big jump, I think you would agree. Making front of somebody's name, genocide are two wildly different things. And the pyramid of hate is an instructional device.

It is not meant to say that because somebody did X, Y is going to happen, or in this case, A, all the way to Z. I mean, it's a super big jump. So of course, they felt that this was a little bit of, we're now stirring the pot maybe is I think how they internally felt. I'm reading into it, but they said, basically, we're taking this too far. The list is gone. The people who made the list have been reprimanded.

I don't believe they've been fired, which I guess is a, would be a compassionate learning moment, as Obama would say, this might be a learning moment, a beer summit moment where you could sit together and just maybe just chill and diffuse the situation, which is what I always like to do. When there's a miscommunication, it costs you nothing to diffuse it, calm it down, explain how everybody can learn from it and grow. But no, electronic communications, Twitter, Slack, let's escalate it. Let's turn it. the volume and the hatred and the pain and the suffering and the misunderstanding to 11. Hey, everybody, I thought I would bring Christina Casiopo. I pronounced it correct. I'm hoping.

You got it. Yep. All right. You're the founder of Vanta. People have been hearing your ads on the pod for the last year. And I thought it would be fun to have you on and you to explain why you created Vanta and what SOC2 is and why it's important people get it right. So let's start with what is sock to for people who are just realizing they have to become SOC2 compliant. For sure. So SOC2 is at its high level. It's sort of a customer asking you to prove your security. Now, these audit firms that you partner with, you prepare everything, but you still need

to have an auditor. So who gets the order? You or the company that is engaging in Vanta? Yeah, absolutely. So one part of what we do at Vanta is we've built a network of audit firms and there's a couple does and we work with today. So we're happy to broker introductions, help companies kind of choose what sort of auditor or firm would be best for them. And then the other part of the pitch is, you know, that auditor knows Vanta understands and trusts our data. And so the audit will be faster and cheaper

if one of our network firms are used. All right, fantastic. Well, thanks so much for coming on and telling the audience why you should get your SOC II, when you should get it and how you should do it. And you've been very nice to our audience, giving them $1,000 off, which is a really significant and generous offer, go to vanta.com slash twist. V-A-N-T-A-com slash twist to get $1,000 off your sock too. Thanks, Christina. Appreciate it.

Thank you so much. Cheers now. So they have an all-hands meeting and that original member, they do that all-hem meetings on the 30th. And this, this all occurred in a week.

So this is how quickly things escalate in today's charged environment. The chief strategist of the company, according to Casey Newton's excellent reporting. He's like an old-school reporter, even though he's a little bit younger, also has great hair and a great newsletter. He, we follow each other on, on the social media and we make jokes. And I really do like him.

I think he's got like an actual sense of humor about this stuff. And he generally takes it down the middle in terms of, you know, reporting, which I wish more reporters would do, like not interjecting, you know, some belief system into this, just telling you the facts. So good on Casey for that. So according to his reporting, the chief strategy officer, chief strategy officer, chief strategy officer. This is somebody who thinks strategically to the point at which they are given the title Chief Strategy Officer, which makes this super ironic. Ryan Singer, and I don't mean to, I probably

even shouldn't say his name, but anyway, it's all out there, so I'll just say it, Ryan Singer. And I'm sure he's a good person. I assume everybody's a good person, right? That's a good assumption to make in life. He makes the assertion. We don't live in a white supremacist's culture. I believe he is referring to the company, but he might be recurring to the world at large. I think this is another discussion that's happening in America, is the entire society, a white supremacist society. That's pretty much beyond the mandate of this podcast, this week in startups, and I didn't study any of this stuff. So I'll put that on the side. He winds up, resigning this weekend. And, you know, because tensions were so high after the call that I decided

it won't be tenable to stand the team. That's his quote. So Basecamp decides they're going to offer a ridiculous amount of severance, which I, the cynic in me, I'm going to get to this a minute, or the strategist in me, I'm no chief strategy officer, but I am a strategist, believes that this was strategic. Six months is an obscene amount of severance to offer people to just leave the company. I mean, half a year? Who gets that? Nobody gets that. Nobody in the real world gets that. But okay, they offer six months of severance for people who've been with base camp for over three years. And the company has had virtually no turnover, I understand, because they pay people well. It's a profitable company.

You get to work from home. You get farmer's market credits. I mean, kind of a hard company to leave when you think about it or before this. But if you offer people in the age of COVID during a pandemic six months to go on vacation and get paid, or to cut their expenses and go on vacation for a year, I might take that. If you offered me what I made in the last year for the next six months, I'd be tempted. That's me. I'm doing pretty good.

And if you weren't, if you hadn't been there, you get three, I think you got three or four months. The entire place is in a burning wreckage of flames and hatred and suffering. So the logical thing for people to do if they don't want to suffer through this is to take it. And of course, a third of base camp employees resigned. And according to Casey Newton and according to the large number of employees who decided this was their chance to get thousands of likes and retweets and make a very public statement about it. And so there's just tons of we actually put in the show notes. And if you want to check out our show notes, we're doing really great show notes now where we detail every lesson you can learn from the show. John Breen on Twitter,

so let's keep track of the folks who are leaving Basecamp and do what we can to find them a new home when they're allowed to exist without being told they're divisive. Or divisive. Obviously, he's got a point of view here. And then,

by Solana, I think is his name? While it may feel like 600 or 6,000, there are in fact only like 60 people who work at Basecamp. It's just almost every one of them is a loud, unstable Twitter personality. That's a little bit intense. So you get both sides.

The woke and the like red pill. So we got blue pill and red pill dunking like crazy on Twitter. If you work at the company, you're probably just exhausted at this point. And they've just put a pile of money and freedom in front of you. Of course,

that is a really enticing. Not to be left out of this. Oh, and then somebody added amusing. And they have Larry David as their icon. So obviously they're coming from a certain level of cynicism here. They said, imagine hiring somebody who publicly left their less company job because they couldn't lecture their coworkers on company slack on company slack about politics.

And I think I wish all the employees who resigned well, first off. And I don't think that any of them are necessarily bad people. I don't know any of them. How could I make that assertion? And I don't think the people who are, you know, making jokes about this on Twitter are bad people because people, that's what Twitter is for, to make jokes. But I do think if you were going to hire people who had the position, they want to talk about politics at work, which I don't think resigning from base camp means. That's another jump that I don't think you can make because you might want to leave because you just don't want to be involved with madness in chaos or you just found the package so appealing.

So I don't agree with this statement. If I'm being totally honest here and objective, it is a funny tweet. But it does lead to my policy. My policy is you want to talk about politics or something that's a charged subject at work, you can do that in person, on a Zoom call, on your own time. But we don't have that at work in Slack or email. Why? Because of what we just saw happen at Coinbase and what we just saw happen at Basecamp.

So if you're a founder and you're a leader, it's unrealistic and nobody in their right mind would say you can't have a political opinion or that you can't talk to your co-workers. about any subject in politics or in the news. Nobody's saying that. I think during business hours when you're getting paid, do start conversations on Slack will lead to chaos because of the empathy issue. So what I told my team was,

if you want to talk about politics, when we're having lunch and people have opted in to go to a lunch and talk about politics, completely reasonable. Now, I know a lot of us are working remote, So perhaps it might be okay for a group of people or a small group of people to self-organize and have a Zoom call after work and say, does anybody want to talk about how they're feeling about the election or January 6th or social justice or religion or the environment or a global warming or a hobby, knitting, the Sopranos, what TV show you want to watch, anything. I'm fine. Of course, everybody's fine with that, completely reasonable. But, you know, I was in Miami, and I'm not making excuses. But I saw my pal David Sacks. I saw Keith R. Boyfriend of the

shout. And they took out all the red pills. I took every red pill. You know, they had. It was a great time. Red pill refers to taking a pill that makes you more Republican in today's modern era, if you don't know that reference. And previously, it was the red pill in the Matrix that, I think would take you out of the matrix and let you see just how horrible the world was. So the Republicans co-opted that as, you know, hey, if you want to see the real world, it's very clever. So when we say we took red pills, we did not take a handful of Molly. No, it is not 1995 and we are not at the palladium. So I decided to announce my resignation from Basecamp and I just tweeted, I have resigned my position as CMO at Basecamp after 15 wonderful years doing to the recent changes

of politics. I will be flipping the six-month severance into Dogecoin, another great mean. Don't buy Dochecoin, please. Before applying to create chaos at your startup, thanks to my colleagues for being amazing, which triggered a lot of people, but a lot of people got the joke. And I later apologized for it, blaming all the red pills in Miami. So I guess what we should end here with is a poll. And this really hard question. Who gets to decide what the culture of the company is? This is an important question. Well, the employees at Basecamp obviously some number of the one-third that left wanted to talk about these things at work.

Now, was it all one-third? I would say no. I would say it was half of one of the third, right? So let's you say it was 15, 20 percent. I'll round it up, 20 percent. So maybe 20 percent like that culture. So what is, who gets to decide? Well, obviously the founders get to decide.

It's their company. They own the company and the people who work there can leave and go to another company. And we are not talking about people here who are hard up for a job and can't find another job. They can easily find another job. These are high tech workers. In fact, I am certain that of the 20 people, if we put the number at 20, that I would say in my experience, 18 of 20, 90% would have a job offer within 72 hours.

Just let that sink in. 90% would have a job offer in 72 hours. And the other two would have a job offer within two weeks, unless they were complete screw-ups and unhirable and for some reason Basecamp was keeping them around out of some level of compassion or loyalty. Inside the company, I think this was the best quote in Casey's coverage from an employee. My honest sense of why everybody is leaving is because they're tired of Jason and David's behavior, the suppression of voices of any dissent. One employee told me, me being Casey Newton. They really don't care what employees have to say. If they don't think

it's an issue, it's not an issue. If they don't experience it, then it's not real. And this was the final straw for a lot of employees. What this speaks to is the nature of capitalism. It is actually the truth that the founders and owners of the company get to decide. And employees should realize that when they go to work at a company, they're getting paid cash, stock options, farmers market credits, et cetera, in exchange for their work product. The reason there's this misunderstanding here and why people maybe are having some cognitive dissonance is because Basecamp was so virtual signaling that they really positioned themselves as a family, not a business. And in a family, you can't change who your mom and dad are or your siblings. You can stop

talking to them. You can have a dysfunctional family, but you can't change who your parents are, you can't change who your brother and sister are or your cousins. They're always going to be that. But in a business, you can. And that's a good thing. You get to pick where you work, and you get to pick if you want to start a company, and you also get to pick when you do start your company, who works there. And this is why America is the greatest country in the world. And this is why we win and we beat every other country so consistently at the game of capitalism. I'm not saying we win every time.

I'm not saying China is not a threat. I'm not saying India is not kicking butt. I'm not saying the Nordics are not punching above their weight with many more. unicorns per capita. There's excellence all over the world, all over the world. But in America, you have the freedom to choose what you want to do. You get to be an employee of whatever company you want or start your own company or not work at all or be a freelancer. So many options. To wrap up what my followers think, which is a subset, of course, and I encourage you to run the same poll on your Twitter, but not in your corporate slack and cause chaos at your company.

Do you want to talk about politics on your work slack? 13% said yes, 87% no. I think that this poll is repeatable, and I think it would be extremely similar in any company you went to, with the exception of political organizations or nonprofits. Obviously, if you work at a political, you know, consultancy, 100% of people are going to be like, that question makes no sense. But I asked an actually even more probing one, because what I like to do, and what we like to do on this very program, is to think and be independent critical thinkers. That's what we do here, right? You and I, That's why I'm in your ears That's why you trust me

And you listen to this podcast And that's why you've been listening Some of you for 11 goddamn years That's why you stop me on the street And take a selfie Or tell me you love an episode And you know what? I love when you do that

You see me on the street You say hey what's up Jake out Because you know what? This, that's why And I love to take a selfie with you Anytime you see me at a restaurant Even if you see me with my kids Don't take a picture of the kids obviously

But I don't mind taking a selfie I love the fact that we get to spend this time together. So let's ask an even more challenging question. Should you be able to wear a political t-shirt or hat? Or maybe use a political screensaver at work? How would you feel going into work and seeing 100 screensavers and 50 of them were red and said Trump 2020 and a third of them said Biden and another, you know, rest of them said Elizabeth Warren or Biden?

You want to go to work in that place? I don't know. Just think about it. Do you want to go to work and instead of me wearing my NICs T-shirt, I'm wearing an NRA t-shirt and it says, buy a gun, have some fun? Or do you want to go to work and have a pro-choice, anti-choice, pro-life, whatever, however you want to frame it? Should you be able to do that at work? I don't have the answer.

But I think it's an important discussion because just the way I framed it, right? Every single computer had the screensaver, not just one. But every single one had it. I definitely don't want to work at the place where every screensaver has that. That seems like a place that's going to be distracted and people are going to be in the middle of a civil war, which goes back to the original point. The reason why our parents and their parents told us, you know what, when you go to work, do your job, do it to the best of your ability, and maybe forget about talking about politics

and religion at work. That's probably why our parents gave us the advice because they got, some level of wisdom after 40 years at the same job. They said you're better off not bringing that up at work. You ever go to Thanksgiving? Political argument starts. Thanksgiving is ruined. That's all we're seeing here. This is not rocket science people. So in closing, good luck to the people who are moving on to new jobs. The 20 of you who left, if you are in fact coordinating, the best possible thing for you to do is to start a new base camp. B-2. To be or not to be, come up with some fun name that references the Bacamp name, but don't steal the right pay and make a better product and prove to the rest of the world that

you can run a company that has political discussions and a better product than base camp. Go do it. Go do it. Listen, if it works and revenues going up into the right, I'm happy to invest. I think if you believe politics at work is the right answer, we have this grand freedom and experiment here in the United States. You can go do it. I have my personal belief, which is not worth the risk. Do it in person. Go have a hamburger. Go for a walk and talk. I think base camp will become a happier and more productive company after they resolve this. And I think the people who leave will be happier. And they'll do great. And I'm absolutely thrilled. to end this conversation for the internet and the industry.

After my final joke, which was, just to troll my own company, I created a room called politics at launch my investment company. And then I pinned a tweet, this is a honey trap. If you hang out in this room instead of finding great companies to invest in or amazing podcast guests, you're fired. and then I invited all my employees into the room. And producer Jackie said, what about religion?

Can we start a room about religion? And then somebody else joked. Well, can we start one about Christianity or Judaism or atheism? And nobody got any work done for half an hour. We all laughed. And now I give you permission to close the book on this nonsense and get back to work. All right. Your question's coming up.

Stick with us. Everybody is interested in alternative assets, whether it's cars or baseball cards or NFTs, equity crowdfunding. And there is a lot of misinformation out of there. There's some deals that I wouldn't send my relatives or friends to. You need to be careful. You need to do your diligence. But you know what investors need more than anything before they start investing?

They need a platform with a proven track record. And you want a platform that thoroughly vets every startup, every opportunity, and provides the highest quality deals. Some platforms will put. without almost any deal. Other platforms are very selective. And the most selective, in my mind, our crowd. Accredited investors are in luck because our crowd has already vetted over 14,000 companies, but only one or two percent past their diligence process. So as far as crowdfunding goes, our crowd is the cream of the crop. They've designed it that way. They say no many, many, many,

many, many, many, many, many, many more times than they say yes. And that benefits the people who are investing on the platform, the accredited investors. So they have recently invested a lot of alongside Jeff Bezos, SoftBank, and other top-tier firms, and the investment professionals at Our Crowd have already invested hundreds of millions of dollars in over 200 companies with dozens of exits. Our Crowd is investing in medical technology, breakthroughs in ag tech, and food production, solutions in the multi-billion dollar robotic industry, and so much more. The OurCROT account is free.

Just go to OUR-C-O-WD.com slash twist and check out how great their filtering is. Read the deal memos. It's always free to do that. going to get a free education. Highly recommend our crowd.com slash twist. Okay, Pablo asks me, how do you surround yourself with people that are smarter than you and more successful than you? That's a great question. I never actually thought about that. We all meet a lot of people. Some of them are more interesting than others. And when I meet smarter or more interesting people, I will generally engage with them more and be more interested

in them. And there's a very interesting book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. And it's one of the best selling books of all time. And the reason is because it has a very simple piece of advice. If you're interested in other people, you'll be an interesting person. And I think if I were, my interpretation of this and perhaps even a little evolution on this thesis is, if you ask people interesting questions and you're interested in them? Well, yes, of course that makes them feel good, because who doesn't want people to be interested in them? And there's a bunch of persuasion techniques like that

by saying people's names. So if you were like, oh, hi, Jeff Bezos, you know, when you say the name, it kind of triggers a little dopamine. Oh, they said my name. Oh, hey, Jason Calcanus. But that seems insincere and like a trick. But I think if you are interested in them

and you ask them an interesting question about what they're working on you learn right and so and they might also like to explain things to you

and see you learning so it might actually be like when I answer your question Pablo the fact that you asked me an interesting question it was a really great experience for me

to think about your question I know we're getting a little meta here but you asking me about having smart friends and successful friends and colleagues, has made me feel good about you, asking me that question,

which makes me want to spend more time with you. In other words, you're good at having a conversation. And so I think one of the reason, my besties, and somebody made fun of me on the Twitter for this, are like, you know you're the least successful bestie. And I'm like, by design,

that's how I do it. Why do you think I'm so successful? Do you think when I'm sitting there with David Sacks, you know, hanging out and, you know, David Sacks and when we first met, we both love movies. We would go and our wives don't like Tarantino movies and, you know, are not interested in going to see movies, maybe to the level of air. So David and I, when we were in the same cities, we would go see movies. Chamath and I both love playing cards. We both love going to great restaurants. And Freiburg and I, well, no, I think about it. We've got to spend more time with Freeberg. But anyway, Freeberg and I are, developing the same type of relationship. And in fact, I went with him on a trip to Monsanto. He invited me to go out to Monsanto after he sold his company to them and learn about genetically engineered foods.

And so it's such a great question because I think you could do it without being insincere. Now, if somebody's dumb and stupid or mean or dull in some way, you don't get anything out of your conversation with them, you are not obligated to spend more time with them. So I think what some people do is they may have friends that, you know, they were forced to have because they went to high school together or college and then you're you're not obligated to keep that friendship forever.

I mean, you can. And it's nice if it works for both parties. But do lean into being a good friend with people who you can learn from and who, you know, maybe are doing great things in the world. And I'll tell you something about successful people. And maybe people don't want to admit this. But when I started to become successful when I was in my 20s and 30s, I had a really weird experience

and I know other people have had it. You become super successful. And then you're at home on a Friday or Saturday night. You may have had this experience as an unsuccessful person or as a successful person. And I would have a night where I'd be like, oh, I know a lot of people, but my phone's not ringing

and I'm not doing anything tonight. And I started to feel like a loser. And I talked to a friend of mine Fritz, who happens to be a PhD in psychology, who both went to Ford him together. And Fritz said to me, you know, if you're lonely on a Friday and Saturday night and you're wondering where your friends are,

ask yourself, did you call your friends and asked them to do something? Or are you waiting for them to call you and ask you to do something? So here's your challenge for the week. Find the most interesting person or two that you met in the last year and say, hey, you'd do anything Saturday night? Was wondering if you wanted to grab dinner.

worse that happens is they're busy or don't get back to you don't take it personal people are busy but if you ask you know three or four people hey you want to hang and have dinner be the person who coordinates that because there are other people who are probably experiencing what your experiences which is loneliness or they're just not making the effort to be the person coordinating and actually had this in my friendship with mark pinkis um you know a very famous person and um i was like wow i haven't i haven't seen mark in a long time and i realized with mark I was always the one inviting him out. And I was like, Mark, I haven't seen you forever.

And he's like, oh, well, you didn't invite me to anything. And I said, Mark, why don't you invite me to something? And then he invited me to go hell of skiing with him or something crazy like that. And I couldn't make it. But Mark remains one of my great friends. Hey, Mark, if one of your friends sends this to you. But I love spending time at Mark. And I got to see him recently during the pandemic.

We did a socially distanced thing outside. We talked for four hours, maybe. And you know what? There's like a friend who you have, who you haven't talked to. and just reach out. And you know, you got nothing to lose and so much to gain. There's also the Bill Clinton trick. My producers put in the notes. And he says someone's name three times with the first two minutes of meeting them. I don't know if that's true or not. But I did meet Bill Clinton. And I definitely heard him say my name one time. Hillary was running for Senator in New York.

I had helped with that campaign. I walked into the fundraiser. I get out of the elevator. And I kid you not. There is zero exaggeration here. Bill Clinton is standing right in front of me. And he looks me dead in the eyes. And he says, oh, Jason Calican is so great to meet you. And he starts shaking my hand and he puts his hand on my other hand on my elbow. I just want to thank you for everything you've done for help Hillary with our campaign. It means the world to both of us. And just, I think we're going to do great things here in New York. And I felt so special. I was literally shaking for a couple of minutes and I just remembering it now because I'm in New York and I go inside and I tell the story to a friend or two of mine and they said,

hey dummy, he waits at the elevator during these fundraisers. Somebody downstairs tells you Jason Calacanis is coming up the elevator. He waits at the elevator. They greet every person. And I was like, oh, I still feel great. I still love it. To this day, I'm smiling just thinking about meeting Bill Clinton. So there you have it, folks. It works. Even if it might be a little cynical or premeditated.

I don't care.