This Week in Startups - $COIN partners with $BLK, $AMZN acquires iRobot for $1.7B, Jay Trading update + OK Boomer | E1527

Episode Date: August 6, 2022

Solo Jason news day! First up, Jason breaks down Coinbase's performance as a public company and its recent partnership with BlackRock (2:18), then he covers Amazon acquiring Roomba-maker iRobot (18:08), before wrapping the news with a Jay Trading update. (24:53) Producer Rachel wraps the show by interviewing Minted's Marcus Milione for OK Boomer! (52:35) (0:00) Jason intros today's topics! (2:18) Jason analyzes $COIN's performance as a public company and its volatile price fluctuations (14:52) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (15:59) BlackRock partnering with Coinbase to manage its institutional crypto trading business (18:08) $AMZN acquires Roomba-maker iRobot for $1.7B (23:38) Helpware - Go to https://helpware.com/TWIST to get $1000 off your first invoice (24:53) Jason debuts jaytrading.com and gives his reasons for doing it (30:58) $WBD down ~17% after a bad earnings report (36:53) Bubbles - Get unlimited screen and video recordings for free at https://usebubbles.com/twist (38:10) Jason tells a quick story about meeting Bill Clinton & talks to Producer Rachel about her first year of interviews on OK Boomer (52:35) Rachel interviews Marcus Milione on brand building, monetizing a passion, and more

Okay, everybody, welcome to this week in startups for a Friday. It's a solo dolo, Jason Newsday. I'm back to going solo because Molly has a well-earned vacation. We're going to do a full Coinbase breakdown ahead of their earnings report. Next week, we'll also cover that. But we're going to talk about their stock having a massive comeback. And this new partnership they have with BlackRock for institutional trading. Just when you thought crypto was over, it looks like Coinbase is making some progress.

Then we're going to cover another Amazon acquisition. Amazon is now buying Roomba Maker iRobot, and we'll go through some of the other acquisitions that Amazon has made and some of the ones I think they should make. Then finally, we'll wrap up with the debut of jtrading.com. Yes, I have a domain name. We bought the domain name jatrading.com. And we're breaking down the early trades I made and one of my four trades. Stitch Fix, Amazon, Disney, and Warner Bros. Discovery.

One of those four is down seven. 17% I'm getting slaughtered by this trade. And we're going to find out if I'm going to double down, stay the course, or I'm going to make my first sale. And then, of course, it's Friday so you get another amazing OK boomer segment from Rachel reporting. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by lemon.io. Need to speed up your product development without draining your budget.

Hire vetted engineers from Europe at lemon.io. Go to lemon.io slash twist to get 15% off for the first four weeks. Helpware helps you outsource the tasks that slow your team down. From data entry to world-class customer support, Helpware can help make you bionic. Go to helpware.com slash twist to get $1,000 off your first invoice. And bubbles. Guess what?

You don't have to be in back-to-back calls all day. or get continually pulled into quick sinks. By using Bubbles Async Collaboration tool, you can remove a minimum of two meetings a week from your schedule. Get your point across with unlimited screen and video recordings for free at usebubbles.com slash twist. All right, everybody, our first story, BlackRock, is partnering with Coinbase

to make it easier for institutional investors to manage and trade Bitcoin. Apparently, people still believe, crypto and people love Bitcoin. It's amazing to see Bitcoin be the one cryptocurrency that seems to weather every storm. And we're going to cover a little bit more about Coinbase's performance because they're going to have their quarterly earnings report next week when markets close on Tuesday. So today's Friday on Tuesday next week. Today's the 5th, 6, 7, 8, 9th on the 9th Tuesday. Coinbase will report their earnings. I'm really,

interested in seeing what happens with those earnings because who's trading crypto right now, right? I mean, who would trade into this if anything people are selling or don't want to open the app and look at it, right? This is what Robin Hood and Coinbase, their big challenge will be in a down market when people don't have stimmy checks, when they don't have free time, when they can now go back and spend their money going out or wagering on sports, all that stuff is back online. You're going to lose, I don't know, 25, maybe 50% of the looky lose, the people who trying out trading as a pastime, or maybe they just were greedy or had FOMO. Any of those things are possible. And now they can have other pursuits because the pandemic is over. Isn't that

amazing? We don't think about the pandemic all that much anymore, but there was that year when we were locked inside and couldn't go out and they had to wear masks and all this crazy stuff that we went through. Thank God it's over. And then on Wednesday, I'm going to have my friend Sonny Madra on to talk about crypto, because he's deep in the weeds on. He's building a crypto startup. He's been in it from the beginning. And I'm looking for one more person to have on. A lot of people are away for the summer.

So if you have suggestions of somebody who's actually trading and buying crypto right now, that would be interesting. For me, you can email producers at this week in startups.com. So as we know, SEC, the SEC is investigating Coinbase over selling unregulated securities on its platform. And I think, I didn't cover that because I was out on my rafting trip, but Molly, and I think Deer Jrabosa did talk about that. Now, let's just quickly go through what's going on here.

Coinbase has had a crazy ride since they went public via a direct listing in April of 2021. They didn't do the standard, you know, IPO Roadshow tour. They did a direct listing. And when you look at this chart, my lord, it was at $77 billion as a market cap. You know, you're talking Airbnb levels, bigger than Uber today. day, but, you know, kind of Uber at its peak. Now, this is with, you know, a lot of crypto mania going on in November of 2021. And of course, it's plummeted since then. And this is the really hard part about being a public market investor in a, or a private market investor for that matter,

in a really hyped up market. If you were a VC, if you invested in Coinbase, my lord, you know, you should have distributed all the shares. And, you know, since they, unlike say Robin Hood, I was locked up and the shares were really high during the lockup. And then they came down after we were all unlocked. Private investors typically have a six-month lockup. Coinbase, because it was a direct listing, you don't have a lockup. The shares just start trading. Spotify did this as well.

Bill Gurley has been a proponent of this because the fees are lower and you get to the organic price of the stock almost immediately. Or theoretically, you do immediately. So they could have distributed at these crazy market caps and then took that win. And man, they should have. So this is one of the big lessons I'm trying to understand with jtrading.com, TM. I am trading stocks here because I want to be really good at knowing when to liquidate, when things are overvalued, when they're undervalued,

and so that I can use that to inform my private market investing, to inform my liquidation and cashing in my chips during before an IPO, after an IPO, you know, and when should I liquidate as an early stage investor? And then when should I hold, right? Look, if I had bought a ton of Uber when it was at, you know, $19, $20, it was just a couple of weeks ago, I would have a 50% gain. It's nothing to sneeze at, right? But maybe you held onto them.

And, you know, now you could be looking at, you know, the destruction of, man, 80% of your returns. 86% I think was peak to trow, bottomed out at a $10.9 billion market cap. Eight months later in July of 2022, we're sitting here on August 5th, so just last month. But over the past five days, miraculously, Coinbase's market cop is up 50% from about 14 billion to 20 billion. Now, this is very misleading because when you lose 86% of your stock, right, it's going back up 50%. That doesn't get you, you know, close to 86%. Because remember, you have to grow a lot more. So if you were to go down 86%, you don't just need to go up 86%.

to be even again, right? 86% on 14 billion, you'd be at 24 billion or something, right? You're not going to be anywhere near that peak. And just that's as fun with percentages, right? Because the percentage decreases from the high number, the percentage increase is from the low number. This should be obvious to everybody.

But this is why holding on when you're in a dog of a stock is a really hard thing for people to do because catching up can almost seem insurmount amountable. But this is very interesting. People who are bottom feeding right now. I started j-trading at the beginning of July almost will be at a month, I think, since my first trade. And because I believe, and I said this in June, that we were bouncing along the bottom. I thought the summer would be kind of a bottom moment, but that we might retest those bottoms

over the next six to 12 months, which made it a perfect time, I think, to start j-trading, start maybe looking at what the value is. I'm not saying Coinbase is one of these. actually I wouldn't touch Coinbase because I think cryptocurrency could be having what I would consider an existential crisis here because of these SEC investigations. But look at this chart. Coinbase's quarterly revenue ripped from 190 million in mid-2020 to a peak of $2.5 billion in Q4, 2021. That is bonkers.

But in Q1 revenue dropped 35% year over year to $1.1 billion. And I think this is all the retail traders are just gone. If you look year over year at this chart, it is a pretty crazy swing as a public company. When you're supposed to go public when you have predictable revenues, right? That's what the public markets are for. People are looking to really understand your business. It should be robust and predictable. But I don't think people could predict.

I mean, I did. But I don't think most people could predict that crypto would get hit this heart. I knew this was coming. Only because I didn't think there was a fundamental intrinsic value in, almost all of the cryptocurrency projects out there, not Coinbase, but the things that are traded on Coinbase. And I thought there was also a risk of regulatory issues, including and up to things being banned. And here we are. Coinbase had an issue with insider trading. People were front running the markets and the, I believe it was the New York's Southern District, I think,

when after those individuals. And now we have Coinbase reportedly being investigated by the SEC because they believe the coins being traded are stocks. I believe they're closer to stocks than they are to Chuck Echise tokens or airline miles or utility tokens. So I think if we're being intellectually honest, just my belief, I know people disagree, certainly cryptocurrency exists somewhere between, you know, Chuckie Cheese token. You know, these random tokens that allow you to do something, right?

They have some utility. You can use them as airline miles. You could use them in a video game. And then there's stocks. People buy them to appreciate other people have control over them. This is this whole Howie test. You know, and I guess we're having this debate. Do they exist as airline miles where they would be unregulated or do they freely trade?

And it's obviously fairly trade. Coinbase operates and, you know, even Robin Hood. All of these tokens are trading as if. they were stocks. If you're trading them side by side in any of the apps, and I don't want to just single out Coinbase here, any of them, they trade just like stocks. Now, should the SEC have been more clear? Of course, but I think a lot of people also suspended disbelief in this regard, and it needs to be cleaned up. And the cleanup process, as we know, can be messy. I don't think this is existential for Coinbase at this point, but it's acute. I think it's a very acute situation.

I don't think Coinbase is going away because some things like Bitcoin with no ownership, no central control, Ethereum, you know, those feel differently than these crypto projects, which I believe the tokens were a proxy for shares in the company. And I think people did that knowingly in most cases. Last quarter, its revenue growth was negative, down 35%. And yeah, live by the gun, die by the gun. It's pretty amazing to see this come apart.

9.2 monthly transacting users in Coinbase's last quarter. And that would be the number you really want to watch going into Q2 because that's when the market really got scary. It was scary in Q1. It was like really scary in Q2. Things were really, really down. And just Robin Hood reported, I was an early angel investor in Robin Hood. I was not a private market investor in Coinbase. But if we're being intellectually honest here, we saw Robin Hood, which I think peaked at 21, maybe even 22 million, the active users, they're down to 14 million. So, you know, down a third maybe or 25% at least. 1.1 billion in quarterly revenue last quarter for Coinbase, and that was down 35%. Loss of 430 million. They were very profitable in the 2021 quarters, right? People were buying

up cryptocurrency. They were getting a vague on everything, a little piece of the action. And supposedly, they have around $6 billion in cash and cash and equivalence, but they have $3.3 billion in debt. you net those two things out. You know, they're sitting pretty on $2.8 billion. But the key stat, $235 billion of the $309 billion in trading volume on Coinbase was by institutional investors, about 76%. That was last quarter. What does this mean?

Well, this relates to the Black Rock News. The people who are actually trading, not the trades, but the volume of the trades, right, in dollar amount. So you could have a lot of people trading, you know, a fraction of a Bitcoin or a couple of salinas here and there. that's different. It's very different than large chunks, a billion dollars in Bitcoin, which we saw Tesla held, or $500 million, $250 million chunks. That is, I guess, Coinbase's speciality. And I think that's probably the future of the business. And that's why

they've done, I think, you know, or they'll continue to do cuts and resizing of the business to focus on institutional, because institutional does still seem to believe in this. Three-fourths of the trading volume on Coinbase in Q1 was done by institutional investors as well. So that makes sense to me. People stopped speculating. The reopening happened. So not only is the volume institutional, but the trades has now flipped over to institutional. I'm sure last year when you had just a lot of people at home trading. And certainly in 2020, second half when people were before they were getting vaccinated against COVID. Sure, there was a lot of trading going on, I'm sure, by retail. So this always happens. Retail comes into the market.

They become the bag holders. Then they disappear. Institutional come back. They buy when the market's down. Although I think with crypto, buying when the market's down could be the worst advice you ever get. Because it could be down before they turn the lights off, right?

People forget the lowest a stock can go is zero. The lowest crypto can go is also zero. So I think many of these projects could circle around the drain and just stop trading. There just might not be any volume in them. And we have seen that actually with crypto projects, not the top ones, but I can see the bottom for the mid-tier ones.

just there being no trading. So if you own them, you essentially own some Beanie babies or some rock and roll t-shirts from the 80s that nobody wants to buy at this point in time. Who knows, maybe some day people want to trade crypto assets that are really old. Let me tell you a quick story.

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They can get your developer up and running within a week. And of course, it's more affordable. So go to lemon.com slash twist to get 15% off your first four weeks. That's 15% off your first four weeks at lemon. com slash twist. BlackRock is obviously the largest asset managed in the world. They manage 10 trillion assets. And here's some quotes. BlackRock chose to partner with Coinbase because of its scale in the market and role in providing trading, custody services, prime brokerage, and reporting capabilities.

The services will be available for clients and both companies. All this trading volume in Q2 was institutional investors. So it makes sense. BlackRock's focus of the partnership with Coinbase will initially be on Bitcoin, since that's the closest thing we have to digital gold and people seem to want to hold it. it seems to be enduring. I mean, if you're BlackRock, do you really want to advise people to be buying the next 20 cryptocurrencies, XRPs in a lawsuit with the SEC?

Maybe the other ones are, in fact, securities and the SEC is going to start, I would guess the SEC is going after each of these individual crypto projects and making them pay fines or start only allowing them to be traded amongst accredited investors. Now, I want to see accreditation open to everybody,

but I do think if we're being, again intellectually consistent, honest, and have a level playing field. If you want to trade in these cryptocurrencies, you should have to be, since they're not publicly registered, they should either get publicly registered or they and do all the legal work over again, or they should only sell to accredited investors. And they should be, those trades should be obviously done the way we trade shares in private companies, which is there's a decent amount of friction. You don't just trade them on a stock market.

Why BlackRock is interested in this, I'm not certain. They seem like smart individuals. But in April, they joined a group of investors in Circles, USD coin. That's the tether replacement, I think. Seems like Circle is doing reporting in the way I said tether should do it, which is just put out your trades every day. Here's our holdings every day. So Circle is being very upfront about that.

I think that's why as a stable coin, there'll be the digital dollar for now until the U.S. is available on a blockchain or trading. So clearly BlackRock has something interesting here. My biggest holding now in J trading is Amazon. I think this company is firing on all cylinders. They're just excellence across the board. And here we go.

Another acquisition. I've been saying in a down market, if you got a lot of cash, there's going to be a lot of companies that might be available, that previously weren't available, or the prices might be marked down. And so what do you do when things are on sale? well, buy, bye, buy, as Jim Graham would say.

And I think Amazon is, with one medical and other companies out there are going to buy stuff. I think they should buy Uber, and I'll just move my Uber shares into Amazon shares, since I love both these companies. But, I mean, Uber's the natural home for Amazon, in my mind. I don't know why Amazon just doesn't come in and buy Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, any of those. But I would, obviously, if they were going to do it, they should buy the leader. And for $100 billion, it would be pretty nice. no-brainer deal for Amazon. Can you imagine what that would look like if all the Uber drivers could

deliver Amazon from the fulfillment center in addition to what they're doing? And Uber Eats could be upsold and your membership in Uber Eats or Uber One would be part of your Amazon Prime. I'm not sure of regulators would like this, but seems like a pretty good idea to me. So this is the fourth largest ever acquisition for Amazon. They're buying Roomba maker, IRobot. And people seem to be over the moon about Roombos. You will know a Roomba owner because they will tell you about their Roomba in the first 15 minutes of meeting them. They absolutely love this thing. I, somebody gifted me one. I never set it up. So I got to go find you in the garage. But this is, like I said, their fourth highest largest, you know, dollar amount acquisition. Number one, Whole Foods, 13.7 billion. Fantastic.

Number two, MGM, aka James Bond. They also own Rocky Robocop. 8.45 billion, and then one medical recently, 3.9 billion. And these all have been in the past couple of years. So if I'm, you know, Google, if I'm Apple, I'm watching what Amazon is doing and making these very strategic, you know, I would say mid-tier. They're not huge acquisitions. Even 13.7 billion. It's not huge. You know, there are 50 billion, 100 billion dollar acquisitions that occur. As of 2020, I roboted sold more than 30 million Roomba robotic vacuums in its history. Ruba sales make up 8, 9% of its revenue. They also make robotic mops and pool cleaners.

They have a subscription program. And, you know, they also bought ring. So I do think that Amazon likes hardware. They have a unique insight into what people buy because of their marketplace. They like automation. They like tech. And so it makes totally. makes total sense to me for them to buy something like this. This would be as if Apple was,

you know, more acquisitive. They might have bought Tesla when they had an opportunity to buy it for 50 billion, right, when it was a young company. They could have bought a ring themselves and had home automation. They should have bought, should still buy Sonos and Palaton. There are all these like modest acquisitions, 10 billion or less, that Apple could make and they just don't do it. It's founding CEO, Colin Engel is still at the company and will remain on board as the CEO post acquisition like they did with my friend Tony Shay, rest at peace, Mr. Tony. And they're keeping the CEO and company culture intact. That's consistent with their M&A strategy as well with keeping Jamie Simmons off, another friend

of mine at Ring. So congratulations to Amazon. It makes me want to buy more shares. They also bought Kiva Systems back in 2012. Those are those warehouse and fulfillment robots. So I've always known that automation is big on Jeff Bezos's shortlist. He's always loved this stuff. And they're starting to do those drone deliveries.

And it makes total sense. Amazon made a smaller move into home robotics with the launching of Astro, which is a household robot for home monitoring. $1,000 was the introductory price. And it basically like an Alexa on wheels that rolls around your house. This thing is brilliant. I want to get this. I didn't even know this was out.

I literally want a little robot dog that goes around my house and checks everything. Amazing. So smart homes is a big part of what Amazon wants to do. Remember they had the little button? I forgot what they called it, but you could put in your, it was an IoT device. You could put it in your, let's say your laundry room and it would say tied on it. And you just press a button and it would order your tie. those little buttons, I don't think they exist anymore,

but these are the kind of things that Amazon likes to play with and try things. And listen, they tried their own smartphone and tablets. I think the tablets are still available fire, but the phone isn't. They also crushed it with the Kindle. So one of the things I love about Amazon is they're not afraid to try really hard, ambitious things. And they're also not afraid to turn them off. Amazon's market cap peaked at $1.8 trillion in November.

that was the top of the market, dropped 40% to $1 trillion in June. But since mid-June, stock is almost up 40% $1.4 trillion. Will it reach its previous high? I would think so, and I made a big bet on it. When? Who knows? But it's just one of those great companies for the ages. You hear it all the time, but it's true. Time is money, and money helps keep your startup alive.

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and I'll show you the new website. I was able to get the domain name J-Trading for, I think I paid five grand for it, somebody was sitting on it. So last week I bought J-Trading.com for $5,000, and this is going to become, maybe its own podcast or show on CNBC or Bloomberg, I think if I get good at this and we're doing trades every week or every day,

this would be a really interesting show that we could spin out. And we'll see if the audience really enjoys doing this with me. But I'm enjoying doing it because I want to become a world-class investors. And I will debut here the 0.1 of J-trading.com. I am going to list all my trades. And what you'll see here that I wrote on it, this is not investing advice, obviously. This is more for you to give me advice.

That's my goal for J-trading. I have a four-part goal here. Number one, I want to become a world-class public market investor. What would define world-class? I beat the indexes. Number two, I want to find companies that'll be five times bigger in 10 years. I do believe Amazon could be five times bigger, Disney, Warner Brothers, and Stitch Fix. All of those believe could 5x in the next 10 years if they execute really well. That's my basic premise is that there's a chance of that happening and that I want to really combine my private market wisdom. I've been pretty good at identifying early stage startups and building positions in them over the last decade. I want to combine that with public. I've always been like public is too hard. It's too complex. I don't have an edge. Well, I think I might

be overthinking it. I'm doing this podcast every day, this week in startups and all in every week. Everybody around me is really smart. And all the public companies I know were friends of mine where people I knew were had on this podcast when they were private. So what's the difference between them? Well, now I have more data. So I'm thinking about it. I'm like, well, maybe I could be good at this too because I really understand product. So that's my third goal. I really want to be able to take what I've learned in private markets and see if that,

what of those lessons applied to public markets, right? And I talk about the lessons I've learned here, product manager matters, delighted customers, the product velocity. And so do those things still apply to public companies? I think they do. operational excellence is something that matters dramatically in public markets. In private markets, operational excellence is important, but really product market fit and innovating is what's most important, right?

Because you're up against these big lumbering old companies. But when you get big, operational excellence matters. You have to be able to scale the business as we saw Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, et cetera, have done. My belief is, if I become an expert on public markets, that'll inform how I make private market investments. In other words, can I see this private company

ever hitting the scale that would be necessary to the union economic work? Unic economics work. I was evaluating a company and I said, listen, based on what I'm seeing with Stitch Fix,

based on what I'm seeing in public markets with clothing, why would anybody do this clothing startup? And it was like really eye-opening for me. And then I was like,

yeah, and based upon the delivery and what I know about delivery from Uber and DoorDash. I don't own DoorDash, but I do own Uber. Based on what I know from delivery and the cost and the margin, I don't see this business as a marketplace because the delivery cost would be too high. There's too little at stake. And it was just a really great unlock for me. So that's really my third goal there is, can I take my private market wisdom and have it apply to Publix? And what I learn in Publix, could that apply down into the private markets? And it has already. And number four, I just want to learn from the audience. My feeling is if I put these trades,

out here, you'll tell me if I made a mistake. And so going through the first four trades, Stitchfix, Disney, Amazon, Warner Brothers Discovery. Stitchfix, and now if you were to go to the website, jatrating.com, and you click on Stitchfix, and you open it up, you'll see, I just wrote a little synapsis at the top.

I'll do this for all of them, and then I'm going to continue this discussion and writing on the website. And by the way, I'm using Notion, one of our sponsors here to build this website. And so you see here, I wrote, I made my Stitchfix trade based on my follow the insiders thesis.

So I'm going to define my thesis. We haven't done a second follow the insiders yet. I am looking for other insiders buying shares. So if you know of somebody, that would be a good thing to tip me off to. Bill Gurley was the early investor that we saw do that. We made the J-trade. Boom.

That's been a great J-trade for us. It's up. Let's go back. In fact, can I see, does it show here? What are we're up? I think we're pulling live data here. So my average share price is $5.69. It's at $6.45.

Oh, we're not Calculing. It's calculating it. So we'll calculate where we're at. It was showing it earlier today. So I'm not sure why it's not showing it now. But we're up on that trade. About a dollar per share. We're just under. And so probably up four grand on that one. And Amazon is that we've got in at 131, average share price, and we're at 140 now. So we're up on that one as well. Disney, we bought at 103. And it's at 106. So we're doing great on that trade. And then the only whiff I've got so far is I bought Warner Brothers Discovery at $16 and $0.26. 50 grand worth 3,000 shares. It's the second biggest position because I believe in HBO. And it got walloped, lost 10%. So that's our next discussion here. So, again, I'm not looking at this week to week.

I mean, we will discuss it week to week, obviously. And actually, I will be looking at it every day. But my goal is 10 years from now, can we see Stitch Fix be a $50 share price? Can we see Disney be a $500 share price? Amazon, can we see that being $650? and can we see Warner Brothers, you know, at $80 a share, right? 5x is what I'm looking for.

And so we'll just see if that journey happens. And if we don't think something is on that trajectory, intellectually, I want to be honest about maybe we move the money out of Warner Brothers and put it into Paramount or Disney or Netflix or whoever we think is going to beat each other. And so let's talk about this Warner Brothers. Yesterday on the show, we had Lon talking about some of their programming decisions around canceling the backgirl film. That was a little quixotic and weird.

but I did like what I heard from Zazlov. That's my guy. David Zazlov, he's a wartime CEO. I'm betting on him, and I'm betting on the brand, or brands, I should say plural. You need to have excellence in operations at scale. Warner Brothers has not had that.

HBO has always had that. CNN has not had that. Trump gave him a huge bump. CNN Plus was an absolute disaster. And there's everything in between. Discovery has been an amazing business with Zazlov has run. The collection of I,

and DC has been a complete disaster with moments of excellence, but a disaster when compared to Marvel, which was probably the greatest moving image startup ever created. If you just look at what they did over the decade, I mean, what a money printing machine. So here we go.

Warner Brothers Discovery, which is a collection of HBO, Discovery, DC Comics, Warner Brothers, which owns the Matrix, etc. This conglomerate is a mess. $3.4 billion loss, $1 billion due to complications with the merger. But Q2 revenue, $9.8 billion.

But a loss of $3.4 billion, as we're saying. But they got $3.8 billion in cash. They got a billion in debt. Total subscribers, $92.1 million subscribers. They expect $130 million global streaming subs by 2025. So that would put them behind, obviously. Obviously, our friends at Netflix and Disney, one Bloomberg analyst said, we knew it was going to be messy, but this was pretty awful. So right after I make the trade, I'm getting this kind of feedback. One of our Brothers Discovery previously, previously, previously, $3 billion worth of cost over the next two years. So that's what Zazlov is doing. He's coming in. He's going to make this one service. HBO Discovery, so basically HBO Max plus Discovery. And then all that stuff, you pay one price. Boom. Easy, peasy, lemon, squeezy. you get everything. I am not dissuaded. I think this messiness is the opportunity. I have a pretty

full position here at 50 dimes, but I think I'm going to put a million or two million into the J trading portfolio. And if I, that means it would be either two and a half or five percent of the portfolio. I think having 20 names would be probably good. So 20 names, either a 50k or 100k each. I can keep that in my head. I think I can keep track of it. So we want to pick these great winners. this is my, you know, bet here. And it's not a feeler bet. I would say the feeler bets are those 10 to 25K bets where I'm just trying to get my attention focused on it.

And so we can build a position over time. We might buy more shares of this. I'm tempted. But I think these streaming businesses are going to be juggernauts. I think Disney is the first that will get to a billion. And then it's going to be Netflix or HBO Max discovery that will get to a billion after them. And so if you have a billion people paying six bucks a month, I mean, $72 billion a year in revenue, these things really have not existed in the world.

The analysts are split. We've got some analysts saying they're going to keep their price targets, other ones are cutting it. And the Bloomberg analyst says, I don't think they're going to be the number one streaming services. I agree. Disney's going to win that. And it could be Netflix as number two. But she says, but that's okay. As long as they're able to make money.

And that's, I think, my belief as well. I think there's going to be a one, two, and three here. I wouldn't discount Amazon. There'll probably be three or four. And I think Disney's clearly going to be number one. So that means it's a race for number two. I think we already own the gold medal winner in Amazon. So do we want to own Netflix?

Or do we want to own HBO Max Discovery, this Warner Brothers Discovery conglomerate? I think I'd rather own HBO Max. So that's my update on the, on the J trade. If you have ideas for J. Trades, I'm going to try to do two a week on the show and I'm looking for ideas of businesses

you believe will be five times bigger. And we are looking at businesses that we believe in management. We see product velocity and we see delighted customers. So this is the lens I want you to thinking on. This is the exact lens I use for two person companies or five person companies. So I really want to see, you know, put these two things together.

and then there's one mitigating factor, which is the balance sheet. So in these public companies, we really need to be sensitive about the balance sheet, how much cash, how much debt, how much profit, and that really falls to the leadership. Is the leadership able to scale and run a business to be profitable? Whereas the thing I'm learning about the difference between private and public market investing is these operationally exceptional people who can scale these businesses, they don't have the brains to make killer product. You know, the Tim Cooks are not making the iPhones.

The Steve Jobs make the iPhones. And it's very rare you can find somebody who can do both. You know, I think Elon falls into that. He can build a very big business. He can operate it, but he also is a product genius. Very hard to have both of those things, isn't it, right? I think Bezos falls into that category. Jobs fell into that category, rest and peace.

But most people don't. Let's be honest. Most people don't. And what's necessary to run a business at scale might be different than building great products. And some people can have both. skills, most people can have one is my belief. And, you know, I'm testing this thesis. If this is a sword, we want both sides of the blade to be sharp, okay? So this isn't like a one-sided sword.

This is like a serious weapon. We want both sides to be equally sharp. I got a really sharp private market and we're sharpening the public market one. Okay, let's have producer Rachel join us for OK Boomer. Listen, I want you to go to usebubbles.com slash twist right now, download it, do a quick product demo, and then tweet it to me or email it to us at Askjason at launch.co, and I will personally watch your product demo. And we might even put you on the show. Bubbles is an A-Sync collaboration tool that allows you to do teamwork on your own time. Bubbles helps you get your point across by creating a 3D conversation that includes screen, audio, and video. It is incredibly beautiful. And I have been using it when I'm giving feedback

to my team about inside.com. Instead of me having to write down, oh, I want you to to do this, this, and this, I show them. This ability to communicate in real time straight from your browser with no download, no app required, and one-click sharing is amazing. This product is super elegant, and it's perfect for code reviews, Q&A, strategy walkthroughs, and basically faster decision-making. No more useless meetings. Just use Bubbles.

Bubbles was built for remote workers by remote workers, and that's why it is so flawless. In a recent survey, 90% of surveyed users said, Bubbles helps them make better decisions. So visit usebubbles.com slash twist to start using it. That's it. It's free to start using. Just head to Usebubbles.com slash twist. And send me your product demo.

What do you got to lose? Maybe I'll invest. There are some people who are a level of charisma that is just preternatural. Like you meet them and it's just like, I mean, when I met, I told you this story. You can leave this in the show. I was helped Hillary with when she ran for Senate in New York. And so thank you, they invited me to a dinner. I didn't have to pay or anything.

Like, just like this, you know, maybe 50 people, 100 people at this beautiful loft. And I come to the elevator. They take my phones. I had two phones on me and they were like, secret service. Like, why do you have two phones? I'm like, and they put me in a different line. And I'm like, well, this is my international one. You know, and this is for girlfriends.

And then this is for the other girlfriend. And I made a joke. And the guy's like, come over here. And he literally takes my phones apart. He didn't like the joke. And I was like, no, no. This is literally for when I internationally travel and this. This is for domestic travel.

This is a GSM phone. This is a CMDA phone, whatever. Anyway, long story short, they put me in the elevator. I get to the top of the elevator, Rachel. The door's open, and I kid you not, seven feet in the elevator is Bill Clinton staring the eyes. And just Bill Clinton. And he goes, Jason Calicanis,

I just want to let you know how much it means to me and our family, Chelsea and Hillary, that you supported her run. And this victory is as much yours as it is ours, and we're going to do great things for the state of New York. and I was just like, whoa, and then I just leaned in and I kissed him. No, I didn't. But it was, I was, I felt so in love with Bill Clinton at that moment. He, and then I realized what happened, because then I, you know, I go in, I walk into the party.

I look behind me because I'm like, well, that was an interesting. And he's still standing there. And somebody comes out, whispers in his ear. And they disappear off to the side. Literally, they're telling him who's coming up the elevator, the name of the person, what they did. so they could greet them. I was like, this is the most next level power move I've ever seen. What did you call it? Uh, one hotel that you love. It's like that level. Ammon. Amon level. Amon level. All right, everybody. So Rachel has been doing a great job. She's been with me for a year now.

Is that right? You had your one year anniversary. I'm so proud of you. I did. Had my one year anniversary. And listen, you went from doing your own pod, which was a solid seven out of ten. I told you when I hired you. But you had no resources. And now here you are. You're doing this segment every Friday. May I ask, in the New York City, in my old haunting ground, do you get recognized? Do people know you? Are you starting to become a little micro-famous in the tech circles?

People know what you do yet? Anybody recognize you? A little. So I actually try not to say too much. If they don't know what I do, I try not to tell anybody because we don't take pitches on the show. So I never want people asking, like, oh, can I be honest? I like, I don't know, feel like that's something that we've done really really long. You should, you should totally tell people what you do.

Of course. Yeah, you're representative of the show. You're on air. But it is true that, you know, you should. Weird about it sometimes. I was, I'm like, ah, you're just trying to pitch a. It's fine to get the pitch. What you say to them is, I don't actually, if I pit, what you should say to them is,

if I pitch you to be on the show to the editorial group, your chances go down if I know you. Yeah. So, you know, you actually just want to earn it. And so if you just keep me informed of when you do great things in the world, what we do is we share really interesting products or services or funding rounds and then we work backwards to is this an interesting person to have in the show? We don't use relationships to have people on the show. We use what people do in the world, which is the truth, right?

Yeah, it is. I have my friends all the time asked me, oh, can I come on the show? And I'm like, what have you built? And they're like, well, I want to talk about this and this. I'm like, what have you built? What are you working on? Like, tell me what you're working on. And then we can have that conversation, right?

Yeah. I think that's something I'll have to start stepping up them. But it's definitely been, I was actually thinking about this with everybody talking about working remote and stuff. I feel like living in New York City, I moved here in January. This has helped my career way more than being a full-time remote employee and not living in a target city. Because now with a lot of the OK Boomer guests and other people with startups, I try to do

our pre-interview calls in person, whether that would be like a 30-minute coffee chat before the workday starts or just hopping on a Zoom and being based in New York City, like this week's guest, Marcus Milione, he's a New York-based founder of a brand called Minted. And I was able to get coffee with him before he came on the podcast. What does Minted do? So Marcus has his brand called Minted. It's actually like a dual-sided thing. There's Minted Health and Minted New York.

Minted Health makes stuff like pre-workout. If you go and you check him out on TikTok and things like that, you can see he is obviously really into working. out and running long distance and minted New York is where he makes clothing. Mostly it's men's clothing, but I did hear that there might be some women's clothing coming out in the future. Oh, very cool. Yeah.

So I was able to talk to him about how he's been able to grow his company through his own personal brand on TikTok. And unlike our other OK Boomer guests, I've really been trying to focus a lot on people that are putting themselves out there, especially online, because I think that's a big thing now, especially with founders. but unlike Nate O'Brien or Natalie, he actually didn't have that big of a personal brand before starting his company.

So it's been really cool to see his brand kind of blow up on TikTok and we were able to talk about all things minted. Well, if you think about it, if you can master an organic channel like TikTok, YouTube, email, Twitter, whatever it is, that you're great at. It could be Quora, it could be Reddit. If you can master one of those channels to get attention

and builds your brand, then when you do launch your, you know, pre-workout drink, you're going to start on second base, right? And you may get those first 100 or first 500 customers, and those are, in fact, the hardest ones to get. This is why being of action, we talked about on the blueprint,

you want to have a bias towards action. Seems like a lot of the guests you're having, especially the social media folks, they're of action. They're doing things. They're making stuff every day. And it's very easy to dismiss them. Oh, you're just taking pictures or something.

working out or, you know, in some fancy clothes or, you know, at some FOMO event. But if a thousand people like it, you know, I told you the story of meeting, uh, the super influencer who's an actress. I think she has her own weed brand now. Bella. Bella Thorne. Bella Thorne. Yeah.

Bella Thorne is like, I am completely obsessed with our fan base. I'm like, who are these people who are following everything she does and she wants to be a mogul? Yeah. She was actually a Disney star before she was like an influencer. Incredible. Yeah. She's done everything. She's definitely a powerhouse.

And I think it's also like consumers now don't just want to see like a pretty Instagram page. They actually want to see the community behind it. So with these creators. And obviously like you've killed it with that. Like we always get to hear about your experience like prior to the twists that I know. know today about how much especially pre-pandemic I guess how there were all these events and things happening and how that really helped like distill like your first base of community and now i forgot about that yeah yeah with the help of the internet you know i feel like it's only getting bigger

it's really interesting how many people got their start on i didn't realize ryan gosling was a disney star hayden pan terry brittney spears uh linds leon leon obviously Kristen stewart misha Barton, Zach Efron, I met him actually. At the same party, well, yeah, at the same party with Bella Thorne, I met Zach Ephron for the second or their time. He's friends with a friend of mine. Very cool. That's awesome.

Fergie, Selena Gomez, Zendaya. I knew Zendaya. It's incredible. And I think when they, the issue I think is with a lot of these folks is they don't have an actual community. They have fame. But what does their fame, how does it manifest into a community, I guess, is the issue. what I'm seeing based on your reporting, Rachel, is,

and we should keep pulling the string and see if we can understand it and maybe see if there's a business opportunity here for us is who can become like Mr. Beast or Kim Kardashian, where once they hit some amount of scale, they can manifest it in a product, right? And their audience stands for something. Like, what does Mr. Bees' audience stand for?

Having fun? Like, it's kind of goofy and fun, but it's also challenges. is like he has to actually manifest it into something, right? And so chocolate bars, if it's kids, kids like candy. So, okay, great, product alignment. But what are, if Bella, the ones fans are into cannabis, great. That's, that's legit.

My dream, okay, boomer guest kills it at this. Emma Chamberlain, anybody has a connect that will be my dream, okay, boomer guest. But she was a Emma Chamberlain. She founded Chamberlain coffee because that was a big thing that she used to do in her YouTube videos back in the day. Now she does things like she's the favorite. of Louis Vuitton. She's one of those influencers.

I feel like there's like a level of influencer where I feel like you hit celebrity status. Does she have a specific talent other than making coffee? Her videos now are just really well edited. And she's known for editing her newer videos. And she has a really good view of that. So she's like a Casey. Casey Nice guy.

Yeah. He's a Casey Nice stat. Super similar. Super duper similar to that. Like going from like being an influencer to celebrity, like common celebrity. I feel like status. But she was wonderful at.

bringing her influence in her community and, you know, pioneering and pivoting off and creating a brand off of it. And she doesn't even post that much anymore on YouTube, but I know her coffee brand does, does incredible. That's really interesting. So somebody who knows Emma Chamberlain. Emma Chamberlain. Yeah. She's it. School dropout. She did online videos. Fascinating. Emma Chamberlain 18 is the funniest person on YouTube. What does she do? So far the content of her videos has not been the point. She makes cupcakes or tries her. hand at sewing. Like Phoebe Waller Bridge of Fleabag, that's a great show, an artist close to twice her age, she interrupts the proceedings constantly to speak to our audience. That's where our videos

actually happened. Cool. I'm going to have to check her out. So she was a just videoographer, basically, right? Doing that like vlogging. We used to call it vlogging. So she was like one of the first big vloggers in the lifestyle space before. I feel like she's actually, there's another girl named Victoria Paris that I think will probably be the new face of like being one of the first influencers that kind of pioneered TikTok. I think Emma Chamberlain was one of the first to pioneer like the lifestyle vlogging of YouTube.

Fascinating. Well, you know, this is the thing. It has to manifest itself in something. So you can get attention for making these. But yeah, if she's like really into coffee or I do J trading or eventually you find something that specifically you like. like photography or something, you can really start to make that into, you know, you can productize it, right? I always thought Casey Neistat should come up with his own video equipment or line.

Yeah. Like that would be amazing if he had his own, you know, camera bags and lenses or whatever that he made or, you know, gimbals or whatever. Or a school, you know, if he had a school for teaching people how to make videos, like, can you imagine we would be the first people to hire from there? We're like, yeah. He's teaching techniques. amazing. And the one thing I'd like to put you on assignment for is the video structure of winning TikToks and YouTube videos. Somebody broke down, and I had seen this, I think I saw a TikTok about a Mr. Beast video. And they said, and I had talked to Jimmy, Mr. Beast about this, how much effort they put into editing a video. He said they can spend like weeks on one video. That is just a couple minutes long and that they sometimes have like 40 different video techniques in the first

15 seconds or 20 seconds of things happening in the video that make it impossible for you to look away whether it's characters being drawn or a filter or a cut it's like supposedly a level of insanity and detail that you don't even notice it's like almost subliminal how much how much the video is changing to keep you from scrolling past it yeah So that is... It's crazy because don't you remember? Wasn't there like three... Like you're supposed to stay on a shot for three seconds minimum.

Like if you take a video class, an entry level video class, there's like, oh, stay on this one shot so people can actually see what's happening before trading off. And now you're starting to see the Mr. Beast content of different... It feels like different shots every split second. A lot of this now, I think, has to do with also people's propensity to pause or change the speed of videos. So this has also dynamically... dramatically changed video consumption patterns, I believe.

People are now doing all these videos where it's kind of required to time the pause to see like the outfit change or the, you know, whatever, they're going to do some flash of something. And then, you know, if you listen to podcasts, obviously speeding it up or slowing it down, or when you're watching a trailer for the new Marvel film, they're putting Easter eggs deep in these and they're cutting them so fast that slowing it down and putting it at 0.25, point, speed lets you say, oh yeah, that's Captain America's Shield in the background, or that's, you know, this Star Wars character from Rogue One. But it's going by so fast that literally I watch some of these Star Wars maniacs who have

YouTube streams live, and they'll watch the trailer for something like Android that just came out, and they sit there and they hold the scrubber, and they move the scrubber one at a time to look at each frame and then pause it. Oh, see this? That's what this is. And they were like trying to, this lightsaber, you know, is this person's a lightsaber, or the hilt of this one is probably this Sith Lord and the color. It's pretty crazy. So anyway, I want you on assignment for explaining to us video editing for, you know, Mr. Beast and some of these other, you know, great TikTokers that are doing a fast thing

and how they do that. All right. So I'm looking forward to hearing your latest. Okay, Boomer. Let's go. Okay, Boomer. I understood the assignment. Thank you.

So much Marcus Maloney for coming on today's segment of, OK, Boomer. You were a New York based founder of the brand Minted. And I found you actually over on TikTok, which was really cool from your running content. But that's not the only content that you're putting out there. You are also posting a lot of content about Minted. So thank you again for coming. Of course. Thank you for having me on.

It is a pleasure. Awesome. So I guess the first question is, is there's two sides to Minted. Can you please explain what Minted is and what the brand. and it kind of does for the community. Yeah, so I guess I can't really talk about anything meant to without talking about a bit of my social media. Started around beginning of quarantine lockdown at the beginning of COVID. And started to use social media kind of as a creative outlet.

I was working in finance at the time and stuck at home with my parents. And as much as I love my whole family and my parents, I needed some way to like get the creative juice flowing. So I just started to post around things that I enjoy very much like fashion and fitness type content. And then the brand was kind of borne out of people wanting certain things that either I was wearing or it started with jewelry and then it moved into apparel. And then just being infinitely curious, I had always been using kind of supplements on the sports side of things just because we like I spent a lot of time either in the gym or running. certainly running right now. And so I started to figure out how to make sports nutritional supplements. And so both of Minted Health and Mented New York were kind of just spawned out of my love for fashion and fitness and my curiosity trying to figure out how things work or how things are made,

I guess, would be the summary. I love that. That's really cool. And from what I know, I know you are actually doing a full-time job. That was a remote job, but you were doing a full-time job while you first started minted. How did you know to take the leap and like how long was that that crossover period while you were founding this company and working at 9 to 5? I would spend my mornings and nights mainly building Mented New York at first. Mented Health hadn't started. On top of all of this of like creating content and building the brand, I was, you know, you still want to perform highly at your job. You don't want any of that to slip and you don't want there really to be any overlap.

It took about eight months of us doing Minted New York full time before I felt that I could, not full time, but like working full time and doing Mented New York. Then I felt I could jump and make the leap finally after I set myself like a little revenue goal. If we do X number of revenue over three months, then I can quit. ended up doing that whole entire three months worth of revenue in a day. And I put in my two weeks like three days later after I got caught up on all the orders. That's awesome. So you have always been really interested in business.

I know that because we were able to grab a coffee right before chatting for this interview, which I absolutely love doing. So I've actually got to meet Marcus IRL, which was awesome. But you told me that you've always been really interested in business. So where do you think this side of your love for business came from and how do you think your passion for business prepped you to become a really good founder? I think you can be quite good if you just are curious about a lot of things, right? Because, you know, there really is no roadmap on do this and then this and then, you know,

you'll see success over X period of time, right? It's more like try to figure out how things work and you're going to run. into a million and one roadblocks along the way, but it's like, get on Google, you know, start trying to figure out how either businesses or people before you dealt with that or figure out ways that it's been, you know, figure out ways that it can be taken care of. And I think, yeah, it's just that curiosity. I remember growing up, you'd look at, I always had a thing for like service-based businesses. I don't know why, but I was interested in that whole entire model and how they worked and is very much like your business is almost as good as your people,

especially when you have service-based people client-facing. And so I think that's kind of where my customer comes first, always mentality comes from. And I always try to teach Sean, who I have is my younger brother who is working with us, as well as Clay, who is one of our designers. And it's just like, listen, people are working to make money and they're choosing your business to spend money at. So take care of them. Like you've, I feel a visceral obligation to do my best to make sure everything is right on their end, regardless of, you know, maybe we got to take a hit of like sending refunds or replacing product. It's just, is what it is. That's business. Yeah, that definitely makes sense.

you are also a giant reader, I know. I've asked you for like your audible recommendations and what you're reading. Is there any book in particular that really stuck with you that has been about business? Kind of cliche. I feel like they're on everybody's list. Lean startup is extremely good. There's also zero to one. Yeah, I think those are probably my two favorites.

I'm like glancing over here because I have them stacked on my desk. Yeah, far as like strictly business goes, those two are probably my favorite. I have the E-Mith revisited on my. list. I know that's like the holy grail for a lot of people. I'll get to that this year at some point. Yeah. No, my reading list honestly is like it's so freaking long, especially this summer. I feel like everybody in the past two years, probably because of the pandemic, has just been ripping through books and I've gotten so many good book recommendations out of it. But now my two read list is getting a lot longer than my has has read lists this summer, to be honest with you.

But I've always heard. Yeah. Yeah. But Lean Startup obviously has made a huge. impact on a ton of people. So that's really awesome that you are able to check that out. And you're an extremely hard worker. Obviously, working those two jobs at the same time must have just been not super duper fun. And something that I notice a lot is the difference in which kind of being a founder and working for yourself difference, like presents itself differently on different platforms. So on TikTok, I see a lot of people glorifying the life of founders and working for yourself. Whereas on Twitter, I kind of see this more like Gary V-esque kind of energy where people are talking about hustle culture and how like you won't get anywhere if you don't like grind, grind, grind, like work hard. Which side of business do you think is more accurate to being a founder in your case? You know what?

I think it's a balance, right? I think that with social media, you run into the issue of people glamorizing being a founder or being kind of just an entrepreneur in general. You'll, I mean, spend any time on any of the social medias and you'll see it's like always people selling courses and they have the Lamborghinis and like they're going out to like the clubs and all of that stuff. And they're essentially just selling you on a lifestyle, which like I think if you're young and impressionable can be convoluted because then you associate that with just being an entrepreneur working for yourself. It is what it like work hard, play hard type like that whole thing. I whenever I make videos about, like day in the life videos are pretty common, especially on TikTok. And it's like, I'm behind my computer for a lot of hours on the day, right? Like, I get up early. I have to deal with manufacturers overseas. You know, I have manufacturers on Thailand

time, like on the Thailand time zone. And you're just always dealing with something. And I think like, Well, you can certainly enjoy it. When you're a founder, especially when you have people on payroll, you're now responsible for their livelihoods, right? So you have this burden that you can't really ever shake. And so I think that sometimes founders can run into the issue of trying to escape through not the healthiest means. And ultimately, they end up run down and then like work performance suffers, all of that. And they're just, you know, so I just try to give an accurate representation. I don't have a Lamborghini, you know, business is extremely strong.

But at the same time, you just have to keep building. Like, you can't ever think that you've arrived, right? You always have to kind of keep climbing and climbing and climbing and climbing. So I guess it was a mix of like hustling all the time and trying to enjoy what you've built. but at the same time, like, it's, it's, I would not say clamorous. Yeah. Why do you think that you're so geared into business? Like, you seem like you're an absolute, just for lack of a better term, beast in the space.

So when you say to wake up early, you're not just talking about like the regular 6 a.m. early. Like when we first started talking and about this recording, I was like, yeah, like, feel free to schedule in the morning. I wake up fairly early. My self-thinking 6.630 was early. And you're like, yeah, me too. And then as the conversation for like, kept moving on, I realized that your early meant 4 a.m. Right.

So you're waking up at 4 a.m. You're dealing with people in Thailand. You're still able to keep like a stellar workout routine and you're running a business. Where do you think this like strong, first off, I guess a phenomenal time blocking. Where do you think this phenomenal time blocking is coming from? And also like, where are you getting this energy to keep going? Yeah, I think it's probably twofold. Right. Like I have extremely hardworking parents. My dad is the one who kind of, I watched growing up get up extremely early.

I mean, to this day, he wakes up around 345. So he starts early. And then I think it's kind of like as you get older, you figure out when, when am I going to do my best work, right? Like there are people that work best at night. So that's kind of how they tailor their routine for them. for me, most creative and, you know, in my flow state when when everybody else is asleep and like the world hasn't really woken up. And I love that time. Emails aren't pouring in. You know, it's like there's no fire drills. I can just like bang out work. And then I think the other side of that coin is like, I don't even know if it's good to admit, but like there's this crippling fear of like, are you going to ever reach your potential? Like, where is the ceiling? Right. And I think you can see it manifest in the way I've approached running and just kind of like slowly like checking off boxes of, okay, we do this, this fast, like, what's next? And it's like, okay, let's just push it until we either break or we break through.

So it's like this weird dynamic and it's all inside of my head, right? But yeah, that kind of just like lights the fire. It's just like I almost view it as a game within myself. Yeah. I don't know. I get that. I get that. It's a game of fine your life, which I've actually seen a really good productivity video on

that. I'm a productivity junkie. I'm not sure if you are, but I'm definitely one of those people that is constantly like a bunch of the books. I read our self-help books, a bunch of the videos. I watch are also about, like, optimizing my time because obviously it's the one thing you can't get back. So the same way that like finance is really interesting to me because it's like a finite resource in like the case where I grew up like in college.

Like I had a minimum wage job. So money wasn't something that like was flowing in. Your time is something that also feels right now at this point of my life, something that I kind of have to structure a lot more than other people because I do work West Coast hours. So I wake up really early because the morning. I'm, again, happy you said the flow state even, because that's, again, I mean, that's also where I feel the most, I don't know necessarily creative, but definitely the most driven and inspired is early in the morning. So that's when I get things like my grocery shopping done. And that's also when I get things done like personal projects.

If I want to start writing a lot more, if I know we're going to be having like a taping later in the day that I have to write notes for, I'd rather sit that down, get that knocked out really early in the morning when I have no distractions and I'm 100% on. my coffee first hits and I'm good to go, then a little bit later in the day where I'm kind of feeling dragged on. And the video, by the way, that I'm talking about, that talks about gamifying your life, I believe is by this YouTuber that goes by better ideas. And I would highly recommend anybody checking him out. Better ideas is a wicked, awesome account. I really, really like a lot of his content. And most of it's about productivity. Some of it is about like how he battled social anxiety and things like that. But that was the first place where I ever kind of heard about kind of treating your life like a video game and just learning to level up.

And do you have any advice to people listening, especially people that are young and want to become founders on how they can level up? I think it's hard, right? Like, because if you are just starting out, you're kind of looking for either answers or maybe someone to tell you what to do specifically. And the way I've always looked at it is like, if you break out your days into blocks, right? Or bricks and like you just slowly work toward your end goal, whatever that may be. And you'll find that when you get there, ultimately the goalpost is just going to move a

little bit further away. But you just keep continually stacking bricks. You know, after a while, you're standing on this extremely sturdy foundation of positive days, right? So you might get knocked back a couple days like, you know, stuff happens and that's just part of life. But you still have your foundation built up. And as long as you maintain a healthy routine, just give yourself the most amount of chances to make the right decisions and either have enough time after you do make a mistake to rectify it or, you know, just like keep plowing forward. And yeah, I think a lot of people get hung up on the analysis paralysis type deal.

Just start, right? start, fall on your face, get up, dust yourself off, like keep going and start again, you know, like, why not? Don't, and don't really fear failure. Don't feel any sort of maybe insecurity about other people looking at what you're doing. Like, in the beginning, when you start anything, everyone's always just going to call it, oh, your like little project until it actually goes somewhere and then they're like, oh, you're doing something.

Don't worry about it, you know? Yeah. Keeping on blinders is. obviously really, really difficult, especially when it feels like a lot of the times your whole life is almost on Black. I feel like nowadays, I feel like a lot of founders, especially the ones I guess that I've been speaking to lately have been putting their lives on blast, right? So your life, whether that be like what you're doing outside of work along with your job,

those are both posted on TikTok. How were you able to kind of like keep those blinders on and really focus in on what you're doing and being like, okay, I don't care what like people, from college or saying about my TikTok account, like, I'm doing me right now. Like, where, how do you, how do you focus in on that and kind of drawn out that noise? I think it's easier if you're making content that's just true to who you are, right? As soon as you start to try to fake a personality or, you know, fake being something that you're not, then either people that actually know you, it becomes like awkward if they know about your stuff.

And like, so I always went into it of, if I end up ever meeting people, while I watch my content, I want them to just be like, this is exactly how he is online, right? So it was always just like, stay true to what you do and what you enjoy and don't get caught up in thinking you're something you're not. Just, you know, head down, focus on your work. And just don't know, just don't, don't do it to the point where you lose the creative spark, but make sure that like you're putting effort or providing value in anything that you are doing. Yeah. And it's been really interesting to see your online presence grow along with your business because when you first started minted, you said you had around 40,000 followers, I believe, on TikTok. What's that number now? And I would like, after you say that number, can you tell us a little bit more about the importance of personal brand?

Yeah. So we're a bit over 300,000 now. And as far as personal. brands go, I know that we had probably pretty much just going to say what I said at a at coffee, because I think it's really important, right? Like companies now, and I think this is a bit of like archaic thinking where you have these corporations that they don't really want you to build a personal brand outside of work for probably fear of losing, you know, top talent. And I think that the companies that succeed in the future are going to encourage people to build personal brands outside of work. Not only that, but like if you have a big personal brand outside of work and you are

attached to whatever company you are working at, it reflects well on the company. I mean, I guess if your personal brand is like decent and not, like you haven't totally trashed it, but it reflects well on the company. And like the company I used yesterday, Triple Whale, they're an analytics platform. They're doing insanely good stuff. But I know their entire marketing department. And the way that they encourage their whole team to build personal brands outside of, you know, working at Triple Whale, it's been incredible to see.

And I think that that's kind of the way forward for a lot of companies, Especially now, like, as a lot of stuff has shifted to work from home and you're not just, like, stuck in the office all the time. Like, people have lives outside of work. That's how it is and that's how it should be. So they should be able to build personal brands and around the things they enjoy. Yeah. And my boss has been very open. He actually spoke recently.

Jason, along with Molly, also touched on this. So Molly is the most recent host to come on to speak in startups. And obviously, she had a very strong personal. brand previously. She killed it at NPR, killed it at Marketplace, NPR Hall of Fame. Like, this woman is a beast. So she had a personal brand coming into this weekend startups, which has definitely helped her show because she carries that along with her. And Jason also has added that he supports people who work on his show to have their own personal brand. He's very okay with me having, you know, like tweeting. Like I let, I let my bosses like follow me on Twitter,

which might be like a little bit different than most people and being like tweeting about my my job and having my my bosses interact with it obviously I'm not out here saying like my my boss is not going to hate it here but like my my bosses definitely can see into like that portion of my life and I think it's really interesting because obviously having a personal brand and this kind of field is helpful and at the same time I think kids or people that are Gen Z that are feeling like, oh man, like I wish I could like have more of a personal brand, but like my, my bosses won't let me. I also think that they should take into consideration that I'm not seeing a lot of people create like this barrier between their life and their social media presence. And as good as having a personal brand is, I'm always nervous about like pioneering and maybe going off a little bit more on social media and trying to cultivate the personal brand idea more because I like having like that separation.

what advice do you have on people for people that want to build their personal brand but also keep their life to themselves? Yeah, I mean, it's kind of, there's a dichotomy there, right? Because if you want a personal brand, that's pretty public. You have to be willing to share stuff publicly. I think that when you start to post on social media, you lose a bit of your, maybe not your right, but you lose a bit of your kind of sense of separation. And that's just all part of it, right? Like you don't build up a community by being super closed off.

Like people know about what you're doing, like things you're going through or what you're working on. Or, you know, if you're building up a community and you're known as someone that's really, really smart in a certain field and you're tweeting out all of this important stuff, I think maybe that's probably a bit easier to keep it separate because it's not, it's almost like you're not just a lifestyle type creator and you're more just like, you know, information based. But I think it also depends on the medium. Like you could be putting out newsletters, right? Super detailed, like crazy good newsletters.

That's a much different connection than if you're lifestyle vlogging on YouTube or TikTok. So maybe pick your platform and see. you know, what is it that you really want to get out of it? Do you want to be vlogging your life or do you want to be just writing articles on a newsletter? Where can people find minted and when do you guys expect like your next place or the next time people can actually order clothes from you? So all things apparel is mintednew York.com. Everything else from the health side is minted.

dot health. And so we have a huge collection of athletic apparel. I just actually got the top samples, which is the stuff they pull off the production line came in yesterday. That is going to be, it's being loaded into a cargo container right now. And then probably release around the beginning of September. Nice. Granted, I don't know, you know, we got to get it, unpack it, get the warehouse ready,

ready to ship everything. Yeah, there's a million places. where all of that can go wrong. Will the athletic stuff then, though, be with the health side? Or will that be with New York? Because it's still clothing? That's meant to New York. Okay.

Yeah. So outside of that, we have trousers that were made here in New York City, three different colorways, also releasing. I don't know when, probably beginning of August. The thing is, like, I think a lot of people expect us to follow the normal fashion calendar, fall winter, spring, summer, that type deal. We just release as we get it because we're just, I feel like always playing catch up. Like I'm just constantly spinning my wheels, trying to get my feet under me. And then we release and it's like, all right, well, we'll just like do it again.

Yeah, yeah. Really cool that you like had the trousers made in New York too. We had a previous person come on the podcast named Eric Button. And he has a fintech company called the Contrast debit card, I believe. And if you have the debit card, it gives you cash back when you, buy Made in America products. So if people are interested in checking out Marcus's pants, also check out the contrast debit card.

I can absolutely just plug that. So that works awesome. And then also, where can people find you? I am across pretty much every social media platform, Instagram. I think it's Marcus underscore Milioni. TikTok is just Marcus Milioni,

Twitter, Marcus underscore Milione. I don't even know my own handles. Yeah, and then in any of those profiles, there's the whole link in bio thing, which has a ton of links to my other stuff. Mented New York, Mented Health, the Minted Minut's newsletter, everything you could possibly want. Amazing. So, by the way, everybody, you spell his last name because I had problems pronouncing it. M-I-L-I-O-N-E. Thank you so much, Marcus, for coming on this segment.

I'm super excited to see when you guys drop your next line of clothing. Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you for having me on. It was a good time. Okay, everybody, thanks for listening. Tune in Sunday, when Molly and I are going to do an amazing VC Sunday school and another This Week in Climate Startup interview. Enjoy your Saturday off. I know I sure will. And we'll see you on Sunday. Bye-bye.