This Week in Startups - Debating Apple's return to work & Jason's WFH playbook, $META partners with $DASH & more | E1536

Episode Date: August 17, 2022

J+M have a big debate over remote work: including covering Apple's return to work policy, Malcolm Gladwell's comments, Jason's WFH playbook, and much more. Then, they cover Meta's new partnership with DoorDash for Facebook Marketplace deliveries, and a Jay Trading update! (1:05:19) (0:00) J+M tee up today's topics! (1:57) Apple will be sending all corporate employees back to the office in September + J+M debate Malcolm Gladwell's comments on remote work (12:45) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://Squarespace.com/TWIST (14:04) Hypocrisy of the return to work, understanding the impasse, "overemployed" and "quiet quitting" movements (26:28) Notion - Sign up for FREE at https://notion.com/twist  (27:49) What would tech unions look like? (38:40) Bubbles - Get your point across with unlimited screen and video recordings for free at https://usebubbles.com/twist  (39:57) Shifting power dynamics in modern work, Jason's advice to startup founders for managing remote employees, UBI thoughts, Jason's WFH requirements (1:05:19) Meta partners with DoorDash to deliver Facebook Marketplace items, Jay Trading updates

Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of this weekend startups. Happy Tuesday, the hardest part of the climb. Yes, but we're going to make it. And we have big news. Apple has announced that they are returning to offices this time, for real, three days a week in September. Whether you want to go back or not. We're going to have a little debate about this, actually, about the manager perspective, the worker perspective. But then I think we do a really good job of broadening out and talking about what this means for the future of work.

You thought that was like the most boring topic that was talking about. totally over at every conference, but it turns out just got a lot more interesting. And we're going to talk about two trends, overemployed and quiet quitting. What are those two trends and why do you need to know about them? Yeah, it's fascinating. And then we're going to talk about meta and DoorDash partnering on deliveries for Facebook marketplace. And my theory that marketplace is actually sneakily, quietly, meta's one of its most valuable assets. Ah, and it's an inside job.

We'll explain why. And it wouldn't be Tuesday without a J-Trade coming in. Big news on the Disney front and on the Stitch Fix front. Stick with us. It's going to be a great show. This weekend startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. Notion is one place for notes, docs, projects, and everyday work that goes way beyond a wiki. Get started for free at Notion.com slash twist. And Bubbles.

Guess what? You don't have to be in back-to-back calls all day or continually get 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. It is upon us.

And by it, I mean the return to work, the battle of our time. The new, the lines are being drawn. Oh, boy. At this exact moment, Bloomberg reports that Apple will be requiring employees to come in on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and a third day to be determined by individual teams. Apple, of course, had first announced this three day per week return to work policy back in June of 2021. That was 14 months ago the last time. that COVID was over. Yeah.

Now we got monkeypox and polio, so I'm sure this is going to go great. It was met with both employee backlash and COVID spike, so they had postponed this return for over a year. And in response to this news, Jason tweeted. Well, I think this is the gentleman's layoff, I'll say. This is the proud man's layoff. I'll say this because Tim Cook's a man, but they're expecting 5% of people to quit over this, at a minimum.

I think 5% attrition. So there's no doubt in my mind. If they have 150,000 employees at Apple, I think that's the number last I read. I don't know if that includes the retail workers. But anyway. So they're just willing to like reduce the productivity and happiness of every single employee so that they can get rid of five without having to just suck it up and make the hard call. Impressive. Precisely.

That's why I call it the gentleman's layoff. Yeah. It's like you're too proud. Gentlemen. It's like the lazy man's layoff is what it really is. That's kind of what gentlemen's means. It's like the gentleman's sweep in basketball is. in a seven-game series, you'll let them win one.

It's like, we know we're going to win. We could do it in four, but, you know, we're not going to put our full effort into one of these games, whatever, we'll let them save face. So this is going to result in a 5% riff that Apple is too proud to take. But this is becoming, I can tell you that this time is for real. There's multiple things that are happening concurrently.

The last time the economy was roaring and people had a choice of where they could work. There's a hiring freeze at every major tech company and certainly at startups, and startups are paying less salaries. So they're becoming very cost conscious. And people are trying to get more out of each employee because they want to do less layoffs, right? They want to get more efficiency, which I think everybody's in favor of all sides of the equation

here. But the COVID excuse, monkeypox excuse, polio, whatever you want to make an excuse about, that's over. Why is that over? Is COVID actually over? No, 400 people died yesterday. Now, of those 400 people died, Molly, how many died with COVID? How many died from COVID?

I don't want to have this whole debate anymore. But we are back to up to more than the flu, right? Four to 500 a day is more than the flu killed annually. Like, it's a legit number. It's a big deal. Side note, Mexico City, 99% masked. Wow. Like, hardcore.

That city is hardcore. Yeah. So that's fascinating to me. Literally it was on a ropes course. I took all the girls on a ropes course. Yeah. Which was actually really terrifying. That was amazing.

Taking six-year-olds on a rope course. I know. I was like, one of my daughters is like, we're there with 30 feet in the air. And there's no ropes, you know, to hold on to on this like the final two. Because she kept wanting to go on more,

and more difficult things. One of my six-year-olds is incredibly brave. We got up there. All of a sudden, we figured out the limit of the bravenness because she's like, I don't want to do this. And I was like, can't go backwards. You got to go forward.

So either I'm going to carry you across and we're both going to fall and be in our harnesses or, you know, whatever. Anyway, the reason I bring it up is there was a family from China there. I believe China. I'm usually good at checking, telling the accents. Could have been Hong Kong. Anyway, they were all masked outside. Yeah. So, socially distance at an absurd pace.

So obviously, for some people, it's still very real. I'm just talking about Americans. And this isn't my view. This is just, you know, boots on ground. You can't go out. to dinner, movies, on an airplane, go to Europe, go to Yosemite, whatever your bag is, go to the Warriors game. And then claim, work is not safe, yeah. Yeah, work is not safe.

But last year, you could. You could say that last year. Oh, can't say it. Without a doubt. Yeah. Yeah. So that's over, and the economy is screwed. So now that the economy is screwed like this, you know, it's, yeah, it's a whole different ball wax.

But what I realized was that this is top of mind for people. And Malcolm Gladwell, the famous author, who's a really considered guy, I think, obviously, he reads his books. It's super considered. But he had strong feelings on this as somebody who, I think we all know, writes books from all around the world and does not go to an office every day to the best of my knowledge. He basically said working from home is destroying us. Here's a 43-second clip. You start to feel necessary when you're physically disconnected. as we face the battle that all organizations are facing now

and getting people back into the office, that this people, it's really hard to explain this core psychological truth, which is we want you to have a feeling of belonging and to feel necessary. And we want you to join our team. And if you're not here, it's really hard to do that. It's not in your best interest to work at home.

I know it's a hassle to come to the office. But like, you know, if you work, if you're just sitting in your pajamas and your bedroom, is that the work life you want to live, right? Don't you want to feel part of something? Molly, your reaction? I think I really like. I liked your tweet about how people are talking past each other on this issue.

I think that a lot of people really want to just make a pronouncement and have it be true, including Malcolm Gladwell. And as with almost every topic ever, some people are one way other people are another way and some other people might be a completely different way and get this bear with me this might sound crazy

sometimes people have varying circumstances that make certain things work better or worse for them got it and people need again stay with me this is crazy different things in order to be successful. Got it.

I know, it's mind-blowing. Now, I just want to give a little context here. I understand what he's going through. He's a business owner, Pushkin Industries. It's a great podcasting company. They make amazing content. Him and Michael Lewis and their other partner. I mean, they really are making great content.

If you haven't checked out their podcasts, they're extraordinary. And I think in that creative process, it would benefit having everybody around a table, you know, planning out new podcasts or editing them. Now, in the steady state of producing a podcast, does everybody need to be in the office? Well, we're here every day. I don't even know the last time we saw each other was in, uh, at the All-Land Summit in May. Mm-hmm.

Yep. And so, would it be better if we saw each other more often? Sure. Is the podcast suffering? Because I'm very annoying in person. What's that? I said, would it? Because I'm very annoying in person.

I don't think so. It's kind of fun to hang out of there in person. But my point is, but you know what I'm saying. But we're putting out content at a really high level. It's working. there are ways, like, I have to be honest, I'm finding, and I was listening to your interview with Howard Lindsman, Lindsman, Lyndon. Lindsay, Howard Linton.

And there are so many of these conversations now happening about the way that people must work and the way that they are most effective and the way they feel loved and whatever. And I'm just finding the whole thing like really patriarchal and insulting to employees. Like, it's such a bizarre assumption that you can only be effective and successful and happy. one way. Yeah. And that way just happens to be the boss's way. And the boss is all these older white guys who are like, I believe this is how you have to work because this is how I've always done it. And if I can't see you, then you're not real. And your work is not real, despite what your outcomes may tell me to the contrary. And I think that's why the Malcolm Gladwell thing like went over poorly, let's say. He was getting dunked on. I do know a lot of people agree with him, uh, who own businesses,

or who are managers. And I think, you know, I always try to look at like the intent here. I think his intent is correct. I think for young people who need mentorship being in an office, actually would be pretty dope. Now, do they have to be in five days a week or whatever? Is it absolutely necessary? No, we have people here.

Rachel's developing wonderfully. Nick is an extraordinary contributor previously, you know, we've had people here who've done amazing jobs who are first-time employees, but it would be nice to spend more time in person with them. And certain jobs require it. like if you're building a rocket chip or car, batteries, an iPhone, whatever. But, you know, what's going to, I always think about what's going to happen. What's the path forward here?

Yeah. And I can tell you what's happening in the big tech companies. The reports of abuse combined with the inability of management to know how to manage employees at scale is leading to management saying, we've got to come back to offices, and we got to figure out a way to negotiate this with employees. And they were given a crisis. This financial crisis is their window. Never waste a crisis.

On the other side, this was the way for people who always wanted to work from home. When COVID happened, it was like, see? I had a number of employees I had riffs with at this very company who wanted to work from home or wanted on limited vacations. I said, no, never. Not how I do business. We're always going to work in person. That doesn't change. This business is about founders meeting with them in person, meeting with other investors.

And then you know what happened? COVID happened. The entire industry changed. So now my entire thesis. suddenly became wrong overnight, which is humans adapted. And now the default is meeting over Zoom, not in person. So anyway, I've been thinking about this a lot because there are things that can I run two work from home companies, inside and launch.

So 20 employees at one, 30 at another. I'm really seeing where this fails and where it succeeds. It's so clear to me how this is all going to work out. I think employees are going to start to be bucketed. And I think way founders are going to start looking at this is it's going to become hybrid in both ways. Hybrid a couple of days a week in the office, a couple of days out, and then hybrid with certain group of teams in the office

and certain not. I think the standard is going to become the management teams and will have an in-office culture. Now, why is that? Well, because they can afford to live within 20 minutes of the office. And I think that is the key issue that nobody talks about. You brought it up in our group chat this morning to remind me, thank you. Yeah, that's a cost

thing. It's an equity. It's a commute thing. The commute thing is just bad ROI. Listen, Squarespace is the platform where you can build sell anything. You all know it. I've talked about it forever a decade here on this week and startups in partnership with Squarespace. We love it here. We use it for all our websites from a demo day.com, et cetera. And there are so many great features in Squarespace that you need to know about and that founders love. Obviously, e-commerce has been huge for them. You're like,

well, Squarespace, I immediately think beautiful templates, perfect responsiveness across any device, mobile desktop. Yes, but they've added inventory management APIs and and advanced analytics. They have incredible SEO right out of the box. So you're going to start ranking and selling. And now they have member areas. What's member areas? Well, you can generate revenue through exclusive members-only content.

You can take all of that great content that you can teach people, put it on your Squarespace site, and then sell it to people as a subscription or one-off pieces of content. It's amazing. And if you build it for yourself, you don't have to give that 15 or 30% to other platforms, right? Let people come direct to you. Own that relationship.

don't get disintermediated, head to Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Squarespace.com slash twist, Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. Offer code twist for 10% off. Let me ask you a question, if all commutes for everybody at Apple were under 20 minutes, or if all of our commutes at launch and this week and start us were under 20 minutes. And I said, hey, we're going to start taping in the office, whatever. Do you think it would be an issue? No. Exactly. So, I mean, I think there would still, people would still want some hybrid because like life. Pick up kids. It get a lot easier. You need to pick up kids. Like the flexibility of work

from home, particularly for working parents, right? And particularly for moms who shoulder a lot more of this or caregivers of any type. Yeah. Taking care of your mom, your dad. Yeah. Your grandma, whatever. Like that really was and has been consistently a game changer. But yeah, if people, People could just pop in and out of the office. You could go, if you had a 20-minute commute and you could go pick up your kid and then drop them up and then come back because they're 15 and you're like, I'll be back in an hour. Yeah. That's not a problem. I can make the investment team meeting.

I just got to pick up my kid. I'll be right back. Right. No big deal. All right. You ate lunch in the car. You know, don't worry about it. It's your issue to make sure you work eight hours a day.

So. Yeah, totally. Like we're talking about, particularly with big tech, right? Two hour commutes. each way. Some people. I would say the average is an hour, but yeah. Some people it is too.

But it certainly can be. Like if you tried to buy, if you tried to drive certainly from Oakland to like Menlo Park, you better leave two hours. Yeah. Yeah, hour and a half, yeah. Hour and a half, two hours. Like, it's, I don't know. And so it's sort of just like you're 100%.

And it's not just arduous. It's bad ROI. It's like either either it's bad for the employee who is spending an hour on this work related requirement that they don't get paid for if they're hourly, or it's bad for you, the employer, because honestly, if I was at home, I'd be working for that 90 minutes instead of driving. Yeah. And so the, the, now you're having this, uh, dance occur where people are going to try to figure out how to negotiate this. Big companies, they don't need to negotiate. It's going to be our way or the highway. And then maybe there'll be some exceptions you never hear about. Some crazy,

awesome developer lives in a mountain town. The C.E. EO says I've been working with him for 30 years. We don't want the office. They're too weird anyway. Forget it. I don't want that guy in the office. You'll get more stratification. Like rock stars will be able to negotiate work from home or yeah, yeah, totally.

And let me ask you another question. It might relate to yesterday show. Why can't everybody live within 20 minutes of Facebook or Google or Apple? Oh, that's so funny. It's because the guys who can afford to live really close to work don't want anybody to build more houses really close to work. So thanks a lot. Thanks a lot, Andrewson.

Thanks, Mark. Thanks, Andrescans. So this is the hypocrisy, right? We want people to come to work, but we don't want to build apartments or housing within 20 minutes of work. And this is, I think, you know, this, what do they call that when two people are at a roadblock? An impasse. This is the impasse. This is the impasse.

Exactly. And it's partly why it's so insulting the conversation, too. It's sort of just like this assumption that, like, you know, every employee who works here is, is in the exact same circumstance as the person who has like 10 people to help him with his life or whatever and lives 10 minutes from the office or gets driven there. It's like you're entitled. Yeah, I know a lot of executives who have drivers. Right. It's quite delightful to be able to show up after the commute and leave before it or after it.

Yeah, your time's your own kind of situation. And be driven. Exactly. I mean, it just is like work is not. One thing I predict actually as this goes forward to is like, yes, you'll have 5% of Apple employees quit. You will start to see, because there are some employees, again, back to the original point, some people like this, some people like that, redfish, bluefish, you will have some employees who will choose companies because they want to go into an office or not.

And company cultures will be established accordingly based on the bosses, and some people will pick that and the others won't. And I just want to give advice to each side. There is a movement called like overemployed. And Nick, maybe you could pull up the subratt. The one post I sent about the guy say, hey, everybody shut up about this. and then maybe you could pull up, we'll pull up after that,

the overworked website I had linked here. There's a movement going on now where people are hypothesizing that, hey, it's not illegal to work two jobs. So now employment law is going to have to be refined. And I'm in the process for both of my companies writing a best practice for work from home.

I'm committed to both companies doing it, but I see some of the faults here. This is one of the faults, which is one of the faults, group is interpreting hourly employment, which is what everybody is getting paid for. It is a salary based on hours. And when they get paid based on that, they're saying, well, I'm going to look at this as freelance or project work. Therefore, if you give me work at work and I get it done in four hours, I can take another job without telling you and do four hours. And that's a big company

being stupid or you don't give me enough work or you don't manage me well enough. That's not me being dishonest and unethical. It actually is you being honest and unethical. You can't be working for two companies full-time simultaneously without disclosing it to them and getting their permission. And now this is going to be something that's going to be in all contracts. But this guy says here, like, a lot of you need to STFU. Because there's literally a sub-reader for this. And I had brought this up on the show like six months ago. Now it's becoming actual techniques. Now pull up the website somebody created. Overemployed.com slash FAQ. Work to remote jobs, reach financial freedom.

Thank you. New to working multiple jobs. Welcome to the overemployed lifestyle. Start here with our most frequently asked questions. What do I put on my resume? Can I tailor it to leave out some job experience? There's all this sort of like, how do I job hunt? Is working multiple jobs even legal?

Yes, they say generally it is. Do I look for a larger or smaller company for my second job? I mean, what's so interesting about this is how actually completely normalized and even required it became for every American worker to have a quote, unquote side hustle, right? It was like, oh, we know that there's not a single state in America where you can afford to get a two-bedroom apartment on minimum wage. So you're all going to need side hustle. So we're just going to glorify the crap out of that and make it seem like the only way to live. So then people got home, had all of the hours of the day available to them.

And we're like, hmm, I bet I could side hustle the crap out of this up to and including maybe two full-time jobs. Right. And so it's kind of, but again, like first we were told, You have to have a side hustle to survive in America because we're not going to pay you enough to survive in America. Just to be clear, though, Molly. Shockingly, people went off and got like two jobs. I'm sorry, if they weren't performing at the other job, wouldn't they just get fired? No, no. That's the wrong lens to look at it.

This is not minimum wage people who can't make their mortgage payment or their rent. No, that's not true. These are developers. These are six-figure jobs trying to figure out how do I get a 300K job at Facebook and a 150K job at a startup? up and then they're trying to come up with techniques of how to be on two calls simultaneously. No, I did. Like, they literally are making scripts of like, oh, I can't make the, like, if two things get booked at the same time, oh, I had a kid emergency.

Oh, the internet went out of my house. Like, they're coming up with all the reasons of like how to navigate those situations. I'm just saying, don't we also consider that hustle? I consider it unethical. Sure, it's hustling. If you did it after the workday end, sure, but you have to let your employee know, your employer know you're doing this. So employers are just going to make this clear.

And then there's also competition that occurs. So what if you're competing with another company? But this is the kind of stuff that I can tell you is driving people back to work, driving the executives to drive people out of work. This kind of unethical behavior, also people are using a key shaker and a mouse shaker to put into, because a lot of jobs, if you're in, I think, like Microsoft Teams or Slack, it'll show you away from your computer. anecdotally, the key shaker is a hundred times more prevalent than people working to remote jobs. The key shaker thing, I know a ton of people that do that. That's like a real... Of course it is. Because your company is

stocking you and I mean... No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you don't get to say that it's because the company's talking to. This is because people are going to the gym for four hours or they're fucking around. You're not putting a key shaker on there because the companies. Look at you. It's because you're not working the hours they're paying you for. No, I know a guy he used to work his company used to let him work from home two days a week before the pandemic and he had a key shaker plugged in and he literally would go to the gym for like two hours in the middle of the day and he would just be on Excel and every like three minutes the key shaker would just move

but was that because they were recording his desktop because of the status and like so it's this so if your if your mouse goes idle for like over 10 minutes your manager gets an alert so he had a key shaker really yeah oh what's that software called i don't know i have a better solution for this Anyway, this is the kind of stuff that is causing this problem. This was a free pandemic. I, exactly. Like, okay, two things about this. One, if people are overemployed now, they were overemployed before.

Two, every organization has hitters and sitters. If you are managing to outcomes and you're not getting those outcomes, then you deal with your sitters. Like, I sort of think that there's this and much like how many people actually steal at a department store. This is not the majority of workers. And so the fact that it is leading to almost as. Always, right? Like, it's like when there's the one bad kid in class, the whole class gets punished. Yeah.

That's what this feels like to the people who are at home working their asses up and picking their kids up and trying to take care of this and trying to take care of that. And like, yeah, you know what? They go to the gym for an hour because not dying is great. Okay, but you're talking as a high performer, Molly, who works with a team of incredibly hardworking high performers who put in 50, 60 hours a week because they want to do great work in the world. if you were at I don't know an organization that was large and incumbent do you think there were what percentage of people at a large org do you think are phoning it in more than 20% of the time they're phoning in it whoever's phoning it in is phoning it in from anywhere it does not matter if they're at home okay or in the office and we all know those people who are sitting there playing tetras at the office all that's why people went to open floor plans right but that doesn't work either you can still you can still you're You can always find a way to F around if you want to. Like, it's just not. Yeah.

I just do not think that it's the majority of people. And if these- Oh, no, I don't think it's a majority. I think it's a significant minority. Like, I would put it in the 30% range. But the discourse suggests it's the majority. And that is, and what's happening is that that is pissing people off, right? So you're starting to see.

That's what I said, yes. Right. The managers are making this decision based on, they hear these stories. And it's like, okay, we can't trust these people. we kind of get him in the office again. Right. And this is going to get worse. 70 to 80% exactly.

It's going to get worse. And so now you're seeing this quiet quitting thing. Have you seen this hashtag quiet quitting? No. It is this idea that people are like, you know what? I'm doing the minimum of what my job requires. Oh, wow. And there was a really interesting Twitter thread about it by somebody, ironically,

no name writer, which sounds about right, and said to trendy reporters out there helping to scare people, it's not quite quitting. It's quietly no longer allowing your employer to commit wage theft. The pandemic showed us employers will flat out let us die. You get what you pay for and they're only paying 62.4% of what they should. Requiring people to be available for contact at all times in an non-emergency meeting is wage theft. Requiring or pressuring people to answer calls and emails off work hours is wage theft. But that's right.

This is the equal and opposite reaction. It is. And what I predict is that the more companies that do insist on this, return from work, the more you're going to see, and you're already starting to see it, but you're going to see more union drives. That would be absolutely fantastic. You know what? When I was at home, I got this much work done.

Now you're requiring this and this and this and you're not going to pay me for it. And so I want to unionize and make sure that I only worked hours that I'm getting paid for. Like you're going to see years of push pull. If you're a remote startup, you need to sign up for Notion. Point blank, my team's use it all day. it's our central hub. We basically run the whole company off of Notion. Every single company we meet with as an investment team has a profile in our database. And then if I say to my chief of staff or somebody on the team who's an associate, we should check in with that company in three months. They can just

put an ad mention there and say, hey, remind me of this in three months. And boom, people get reminded. Or if you need a person to come and comment on a specific paragraph in your proposal to a client, you need to put ad Jason. Boom. And then I get a notification. 500 different apps have been integrated into Notion already. Google Slack, everything. And everything is in one space that's simple, powerful, and beautifully designed. The workspace is totally customizable. It can fit any workflow or business model.

And Notion can seamlessly transition from a workplace power tool and to a game changer for your personal life. I use it literally for my house. I keep every single appliance, device, contractor, all of that stuff in a beautiful, beautiful Notion instance for my house and for my ski house. Everybody loves Notion. You can get started today for free at Notion.com slash twist. That's notion.com slash twist to start for free.

Notion.com slash twist to take the first step towards an organized, productive work and life today. You're going to love it. It'll be great if there's unions, as I've talked about on this show before. When unions come out, it just puts caps on people's salary. The tech industry would love, love, nothing would be better than to have unionization. They'll fight it. but oh my god can you imagine like NPR or you know a public radio or i know this from apm to business insider right as i left yeah they started having unions right yeah now here's what

happens to union hey kair isdall quite a brand yeah yeah molly wood quite a brand okay you got these offers from oh this maniac jason calcannis wants to give you a better host aren't hosts aren't in the union get there you go talents never in the union uh not yet not yet because you will then be pressured Yeah. Like happened at Gimlet where the people who were in reply, oh, like, no, we don't want to be in the union. Yeah. You know why they didn't want to be in the union? They were getting paid more money because their show was number one.

And they wanted to get paid based on their performance. And they had other options. And then they got shamed. Oh, my God, you're racist. You know, you're white. You're not in the union. You don't support the other people. And I was like, no, I'm a high performer.

I want to get paid the best possible salary. I don't want to be on a cap where like every three years I can apply to move up one rank. Like six percent. when you work, you know, in a union for teachers or you work in a, you know, as a police officer or a firefighter, you know, there's like stages and your career has to follow a, you know, a very deliberate path. It'd be fantastic for tech if that happened. Oh, my God, you're a level one, two, three, engineer. Oh, no, I got a better offer or whatever. It's like, no, you don't. We know what they pay at Google. And then that would just price fix the entire industry.

Yep. And everybody, it would be freaking, they would, they would love it. Tim Cook, Sundar, Satya, they would love it if high-tech workers unionize. High-tech workers are too smart to unionize. They'll never do it. Now, media people are dumb. There are those moves toward the kind of hybrid unions, right? Is it Amazon? Somewhere they created a new kind of union.

I mean, what you have to ask yourself is, do I want to you? I'm not passing a value judgment on whether this is a good or a bad outcome, but what I'm saying is that you're going to have your, you know, this is definitely going to happen. Because you're going to have your 70% of employees who are high performer. Or let's say, let's say it's a 30, 30, 30, 30, 30. it always is. You got 30 sitters. You got 30 people who just like get her done. They're perfectly fine. And then you have 30% high performers, right? Yep. The middle and the high performers are going to feel insulted and pissed by the implication that they have been goofing off at home this whole time. Yep. When it's what I would have done. The average American ended up working like 11 hours more per week. Here's what I would have done if I was at. Yeah. I would have said, we're doing a riff. Every manager, you know, out of every 10 people, you got to get rid of your bottom three performance. You're going to get rid of your bottom three performance. You're not. You're going to get rid of your bottom three performers. It's up to you. And then your, your manager will just talk you through it and make sure you made a good decision and, you know, whatever. There'll be some process here.

15% riff. You get rid of the weakest people. You get rid of the 10, 15% weakest people in any organization, basketball team, runners group, everybody's performance goes up. All the high performers enjoy their job more. It's just proven. It's not my opinion. It's just a fact. Then what I would say is we're going to have, people who are 47 weeks a year, five days a week, 200, 150 minus 50, 235 days is what we used to come into offices. I'd say, you know what? 235 is what we used to do. We're now all going to come in for one third of that.

That's 80. We're going to come in for 80 days. Could be a week in a row, could be two week sprint, a month off, whatever it is. You and your managers will figure it out. But that's our ballpark. We think 80 days of collaboration is the ballpark, divided by, you know, 12 months, it's seven days a month. You and your managers figure out what seven days a month you're going to get together.

Or whatever, you know, pick some number. It could be 50. I don't know what the exact number is. But then people could have longer sprints together, not, if they think that the job needs that. So now you solve both those problems. But there's another, it's always the second and third order impacts that I'm interested in.

And that's what our conversation is here. You have a really good insight. This, you know, slow quitting or, you know, quiet quitting, which is really like, you're paying me, but I'm not working. It's like a little protest. It's, I'm going to do exactly the work you're paying me for, and that's it. Right. No more than that.

Here's the thing. Great. have figured out how to do this. So I'll go through my steps of how to be a better manager and do this, because I'm going to write a follow up to my SOD, EOD. You need to have people who are self-motivated, and then you need to have each, everybody in just, everybody has to be accountable to each other, not up and down, but left and right. Just be accountable to each other to do the best job you can. And I'll get into that in a minute. But I think what's going to happen that people don't understand understand is that the people who fight for work from home, you better be a high performer. Because

what you just did was you are now competing with the globe. And managers previously did not know how to manage people off of, you know, out of offices. Now, all managers do know how to manage people out of offices. Now, some are bad managers still. But they know how to look at output. They know how to write a spec of work. They know how to share your calendar, time blocking. All this stuff is becoming top of mind for people. So then something happened to me. I was looking to hire SDR, sales development reps. And then I tried Magic again, which is just another like Fiverr, Zirtual, we were investors as Zertyville before I went under. And I was able to hire through Magic for 10 bucks an hour, 15 bucks an hour, virtual assistance. And they're doing the work that would have cost an American

previously $30, $40, $50 an hour in America, in an office, not counting commutes or any of that. I'm just counting employee plus benefits. These employees don't get benefits. They're outsourced and they're on demand. So if you need 100 hours this month and none, and I've done this now for a lot of tests, you've seen me do it. And it's working beautifully.

So a whole category of work that I would say would be $50,000 to $70,000 jobs are now on-demand jobs. And I think we probably spend $1,000 a month, $12,000 a year for what I would have spent previously $50,000 to $70,000 on hiring a job for. Yeah. So you've got to let that sink in.

That's going to just keep happening. and people are doing this now for customer service. They're doing it for sales development. They're doing it for design. So designers now offshore in South America, developers in South America cost half a third of what they do in the U.S. The counter-argumentally, of course, is, well, that's always existed. Not really.

Two things didn't exist. Those workers, it didn't exist at scale. Those workers were not getting the phone calls from top companies because the top managers had the luxury of hiring, you know, American workers who wanted to come to an office that they could bond with and build their little organization. They could have their designer and their SDR and everybody here. Now managers are like, I don't need another headcount for that. I'll save my head count for, you know, a real heavy hitter. Or instead of having these three, you know, B-level players, and it's not B-level, it's sort of like commodity work or, you know, what becomes wrote, this is going to take the entire average of salaries down to a a global average. And the global average. Or up, right? Like, let's not. Up if you're out. If if you're in South America, it's going up. And if you're in America, it's going down. Normalize. It's going to normalize. It's going to normalize. But I'm just speaking from an American perspective. It's super interesting. It's economic globalization, right? Like so far we've had manufacturing

globalization where we outsourced because it was cheaper. We are now going to outsource because it's cheaper, but there is the potential for, I mean, it will effectively be unlimited supply for these jobs. So I don't know that the prices are going to go. The economic benefit will be diffuse or slow in some of these other places that are able to provide talent in this way. But it could have a massive, I mean, I completely agree. I think like long term, that's what I also find sort of, it's like depressingly short-sighted the conversations that people like a Malcolm Gladwell is having about the way you have

to work and the way you've always worked and the way offices have to be in the whatever. Because like, in fact, this is in. so many ways COVID has been a hinge event that's going to change every branch of the way that we live. The timeline has split. We're on a different timeline right now. We are on a different time right now. This is a different version of the multiverse. And this multiverse says you don't need to come to an office and you don't need to have

these jobs in a typical company. So you used to have to have a server farm. That's AWS. You know, you used to have to have an accounting firm in an HR department. You know, that's one of these PEOs or outsource services, right? everything becomes like a little API. Now, the difference is managers now, because of Slack and teams, Coda, Notion, all of these no-code tools are also learning.

Well, when I'm managing this $70,000 American, what do I get back from them? I get a Google sheet. I get an Excel. I get a Notion page. I get a Coda page. I get a snippet of code. I get a logo. I get an edited short video for TikTok, whatever the output is.

Well, these managers are now going for managing culture and meeting culture and whatever bullshit was happening in the office and arguing over parking spaces and espresso and the drinks and the fine bars and, you know, you're dry cleaning. That's what the managers were dealing with. And sexual harassment and shit culture and, you know, somebody's unhappy about this. And now all that goes to zero. Yeah. No more of that performative, accruittment, you know, bribing people to be happy. Mm-hmm. There's no more bribing people to be happy.

It's what's your output? What's your output? And then everybody becomes ruthless on both sides. The freelancers are going to become ruthless. If you're the video editor who's doing Malcolm Gladwell's podcast for Pushkin Industries, and I come along and I'm like, he's underpaying you. I'll pay you more. The New Yorker says we have unlimited budget.

We'll pay you more. Whatever it is. Mark Andreson and his future.com, you know, this incredible tech website they launched that's just crushing it. Like you've read like four articles today on Future.com? Yeah. They spent like $2 million on the domain name? I thought you said ever. I thought you said I've read four articles ever.

Remember that? Remember they were going to... I do remember that, yeah. They were going to be the absolute canonical, like, truth, positive. We had a call, actually. It's time to blog? It's time to blog. And then the recruiter called me later and was like, hey, I just wanted to let you know they're not even close.

They're not within even a mile of your salary requirement. So, yes, all those underpaid people who are just crushing everything. God, I really am trying to get blocked. Who cares? I got unfollowed step one. Oh, oh, are you really? Yeah, Mark and he doesn't follow me. Welcome to the club.

It's not a full break up. It's just a break. 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 atlaunch.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 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. I completely agree with you. I think like all of this is about the shifting of the power dynamic up to and including the response that managers are having, right? People are like, no, you're a worker who is my property. I need to be able to see you and own you and own your time and know what you're doing all the time. And workers are like, yeah, turns out, no, work is a contract, right? It's a two-way contract in which both people have equal dignity, regardless of their net worth. And you are entitled to my outcomes. That's it. Right? Well, here it is. And so you're going to end the idea that

that you could build a global workforce will change every dynamic, the crappy manager dynamic and the crappy worker dynamic, because we know that both exist in equal measure. I want to give advice to founders, right? This is this week in startups. Here's what founders should do. Number one, you have to separate out passion and motivation and enthusiasm for your company's mission and work product. right, these can be two different things.

So I'm just going to outline maybe three buckets here. There obviously could be more, but just three J-Cal buckets here. Your management team needs to be highly mission-driven, right? You care about startups, you care about the future. Nick cares about startups. He loves business. Like, Rachel's obsessed with Gen Z and technology. Like, great, okay, the leaders, the full-time people have to be motivated.

And we've seen this here, right? we've had people who are amazing at editing videos, but maybe they don't care about startups. Maybe they care about music. Maybe they care about science fiction. Who knows what they care about? And so they don't need to have the mission alignment. Those are contributors and then there's freelancers. So let's just say mission driven people, they get a lot of equity.

They get great comp. And it's their actual personality to want to give all their time to work, right? Like, that's my style. Yeah. I don't do that because you want me to. I just prefer it. I got bored on the beach. and started doing work because I like it better.

And those are the people who you've got, that's a tier. That's the tier. That's your top tier. That's the most important tier in your company. You need to build relationships with them. You need to treat them really well. You need to check in on them. But you don't need to push them. You can just have a conversation with them.

When I have somebody like that and they're not performing at a level, I'd literally just say to him, hey, I noticed this didn't get done. I know that we both know this is not the level of work you do. Anything I can do to help here, just drop the ball. did you not have the resources you need? Did you just simply forget about it? And they're like, I forgot. My bad.

You know, they just take ownership and everybody moves on. Then there's a second tier. Now, these people could be full time. They may not hate the mission or they're not required to be super enthusiastic. They just be highly competent. You can have highly competent people. They're not anti. They're generally good soldiers.

They work hard. Product is consistent. But you don't need to manage them. But they also, but they don't have the motivation. Okay. They shouldn't be in the top tier positions. But they can be in a second-term position. You just have to know they're going to leave,

and they're going to give two weeks notice, or they're going to give no weeks notice. And you don't need to obsess over those folks. They're just like, I think they call them in the NBA, like journeymen. They're going to come in, they're going to, you know, play the game right. Utility infielders. Utility, journeyman, whatever. Totally.

Adequate. Now there's the third tier, which I talked about before, which is like, you know, Fiver, magic, you know, all these great freelance places. And those people are going to do tasks for you. And you're going to, you're going to look at the outcome. output and you're constantly going to say to them, can you make this better? Can you do this cheaper? Some combination of that. And then they're going to look at you and say, can you pay me more for doing less? And this is called a marketplace. It's a natural ruthlessness. Yeah. The best thing a

freelancer can do. Actually, I talked to my brother about this. He's an electrician. And he's like, he's overworked. I said, Josh, double your rates. And if you don't have half the people saying no, you're not doing your job. But if half the people say no and you've doubled your rates, you're charging far too little, then you'll have the same income and half the work. Yeah. He did it. It worked better than he expected. Good.

He kept more than half. He's like, you're not going to believe this. It's the best advice you ever gave me. I kept 90%. It's like, I lost one person. The person was the biggest pain in the ass. And now I'm making like 180% of what I was making. And I got, you know, whatever, 10% of my time back.

It was like perfect. But he's still heck of overworked, but now we could afford to maybe hire a helper. There you go. Exactly. So anyway. Allocate wisely. Yeah. And so.

Both sides should be doing this consistently, and both sides have now started to do this. And this is the big breakthrough I had with just SDRs. And I've seen other portfolio companies doing this and having great success. But I believe, like, design, even video editing, not for us, like, doing the amount we do seven episodes a week. But for somebody who's doing like one episode a week, of course you would outsource it. Like, are you kidding me? And what does it matter to you if you're outsourcing to Manila, Hong Kong? South America,

somebody in Tahoe, Europe, or whatever, best price, best service. On the other side, I'm going to keep raising my rates until people say no. And this is going to free everybody. And you just pick where you want to be. Now, you have to ask yourself as a worker,

where am I? And what is my motivation in life? Yeah. The reaction to Malcolm Gladwell's, there were very funny reactions where he was like, is this the life you want to live? And they're like, yes.

Yeah. And they were like, talk over them. Don't you want to be part of something? No. Yes, I'm part of my family. That's what I want to be part of. I don't want to be part of your company mission. And the delusion of us founders and capital allocators and creators in the world is we think

everybody's going to be as enthusiastic as us. I left that a long time ago. Totally. I lived under that delusion. Right. It's someone else's vision unless it's yours. Right. And you can join a vision and be totally stoked and share a vision.

Yeah. That's totally fine. But if you do not love capital allocation and startups or building a business community, like you can't be at inside or launch or this week at startups, it's not going to work, unless you look at it simply as a contract. And so this is going to become, I think, the standard for startups is even smaller teams relying more on freelancers. What I wonder about, as we imagine the like second and third order effects of this is

what this does mean for, like, if you have no work experience, right? Like, what do you do if you're the college student who comes out who would have gotten one of these jobs that is considered sort of like low pay and potentially expendable? You go on YouTube and teach yourself. Do we then have an entire collection of young people who are unemployable? No, they have to hustle and do it. They have to learn the skills themselves because there's not going to be an office in all cases to go to and have a mentoring program.

We're going to need universal basic income. I'm just saying. No. No, because again, you're assuming everybody's the 30%. Now, the problem with UBI is. You're assuming that everybody is in either the top 60 or actually, right? If your advice is you actually just have to go on YouTube and hustle and teach yourself, then you're assuming that everybody in America is a 30% high performer.

And anybody who's not, is SOL? Well, they're not going to get UBI. They're going to need to go work and jobs that kind of suck because they're not motivated enough to ed skills. That's the beginning and end of it. Somebody's got to clean the bathroom. Somebody's got to work to register. UBI is a disaster. If you want to know what happens when you get people UBI, look during COVID. They buy NFTs. They get strange. No, no, no, no, no. They start gambling on crypto.

Most Americans saved that money. Credit card debt went to an all-time low. Okay. Like people used it well. They increased their household savings and they pay done. their debt. And some people, some young people, paid down their debt and saved. They bought crypto. No. So tiny percent of people, oh, please, what percentage of the American public is involved in crypto? They started buying AMC.

Come on, Molly. How many humans bought AMC? Tens of millions of them went, yolo crazy. I agree. Even tens of, even if 30 million people did that, that's one percent of the American population. That is an extreme, 10 percent of the reporters plus numbers. equals mistakes. That's only 10%. And I'm assuming it's no more than 1% actually. I'm assuming is 3 million. You probably would take out the kids who are not of working against retirees.

But yeah, so if you had 150 million people. I do not believe for a second. It was tens of millions of people. I do not. I believe it is. No way. Just look at the statistics of Robin and Coinbase. They added millions of customers. Like I think there were millions of people doing this. But if you also want to see UBI at work, you can look at Saudi Arabia. During the pandemic, UBI worked for the American I think it worked to not have people starve, yes, and not be able to make their rent. Hunger went down, food insecurity went down, homelessness actually went down despite what everybody said it was not happening. It worked. But if people do not have motivation and they don't work, their mind wanders.

They're mind wanders. Okay, Malcolm. And young men who don't have work to do, you know what they do? They ride in the streets, they get violent, they get becoming extremists. It's been proven over and over again. Look at Greece, look at Spain, look at the Middle East. You get to 25% unemployment by men. what do they do?

They wind up in the street throwing bottles. It's like the known truth. Yeah, but we don't know if they do that when they're getting UBI. We just know would they do that when they're desperate and don't have any options.

No, no, in those cases, they were getting UBI. They were on the dole. They were like Saudi Arabia was giving people, you know, buckets of money every month. I'm not saying like there shouldn't be a safety net.

There should be a safety net. There should be a baseline. We kind of have unemployment as a safety net and some other stuff. But I just feel like UBI is beautiful in principle, but man, if people are not motivated and not productive in society, it's not a society I want to live in. I think it's going to lead to unintended consequences like you can't imagine.

But then you do have to have a mechanism to hire the people who come out of school who are like medium talented, medium motivated. That's most people. Most people are medium talented, medium motivated. What were your first jobs? I mean, I got hired by a national news organization while I was still in college, but that's different. I'm not a medium. Molly, but have any jobs in college? Have any jobs in college? It's hard to make this. Yeah, I had some jobs in college.

Before I became an editor-in-cheek of my daily paper. No, I worked at a shelter. I mean, this is like, I don't mean to sound like a total. I worked at a shelter for abuse and neglected children in college. Well, okay, yeah, paid to do that. Yeah. Yeah. I worked at Amnesty International.

In high school, I worked at a grocery store. That did happen. Perfect. That's what I'm talking about. So, listen, you and I come from a certain amount of privilege, probably. or at least had an educational lane that was available to us that we took advantage of.

And you're talking about people who maybe don't go to college, right? Yeah. There are, what do they call them, bottom of the rung or, you know, starter jobs, like, start our careers. Like, you have to start somewhere. Driving for DoorDash, good segue here.

You know, working at Starbucks. Like those jobs let you learn how to open a bank account, you know, manage your checkbook, pay your rent, and realize, yeah, maybe I should do something. This is hard work. But you're basically saying we're going to outsource all starter jobs.

You can't outsource the Starbuck ones, but you can't outsource some of the knowledge ones. So for knowledge workers. How do you ever become the middle, you know, how do you ever like, like you, if you stratify your workforce that much and you just say like the only people who are employable full time in the United States are middle to highest possible performers, then there's no sort of starter level available. Then where are you going to get them? Right. Where's your supply? Yeah. It's, this is going to be a challenge.

I'm not saying this is what I want. I'm predicting this is what will happen. Like a lot's going to change. A lot's going to change. And to your point, this benefits people. Us losing the factory workers here was terrible for America, right? All those $30 an hour factory jobs, which were incredible, right? You just didn't even have a high school degree.

You could go work in a car plant and make $30 an hour. Or you could work in a place that made, you know, masks or whatever and make $30 bucks an hour in the union fought free and you got, you know, a pension, all this crazy stuff. And we put it in China. Who benefited? A billion, well, 500 million people who were living in abject poverty, like under $2 a day, they benefited. They moved into the middle class. So we wiped out our middle class, but we took poor people there. So if you were to look at it strictly for the humanity basis, a huge gain for humanity. Yeah. Well, that's, and that was, that's the art, that has always been the argument for globalization. A rising tide will lift all boats. And we never

want to acknowledge, and I will say that when President Barack Obama did an absolutely terrible job of ever acknowledging that some boats sink. Yeah. And that you have to have a plan for what to do about those boats. Because if you don't, then you get Trump right after you. Yeah. We definitely capsize a bunch of boats. And so we can't just sort of say like, oh yeah, a bunch of this whole, I mean, we can say it. And it is likely to be what happens. And the seeds of the next revolution are being planted right now by the idea that a lot of people will be like, you know, and I just don't want to deal with employees. So I'm just going to like pay less to get it, you know, on fiber.

or from the Philippines. And that's, again, some boats are going to raise and some boats are going to sink. The bigger problem is if you hire SDRs, like I know a lot of, all SaaS companies have to hire SDR, sales development reps. Okay. It's a grinding out job, right? You're trying to get leads. You're trying to get people to get on phone calls. It's a hard job.

Job only pays 40 grand, 50 grand in U.S. Still a great job, you know, especially for work from home. It's a pretty sweet job. You can't hire people for these jobs. They won't take them. It's too painful. It's too arduous for Americans. Yeah.

Now, if you're in Manila, or if you're in South America and Latin America and this job pays, you know, $12,000 a year and you don't have to work at a restaurant or, you know, drive a bus or whatever and you can work from your home, they're like they're, they're like they can't believe they're getting paid this amount. And so it, even for the people who wanted to hire Americans to these jobs, the Americans wouldn't take them. And that and that's the other part of this is like we have a level of entitlement in this country, a level of, a level of, of security where people can opt out. And you do have people opting out saying, you know what, I'll just drive Uber twice a week or DoorDash twice a week. I'll cohabitat with somebody, right? So if I lower my burn, I work the best shifts at DoorDash where like it's the weekends or the, you know, four o'clock to eight o'clock when dinner is being delivered. I know it can do three rides an hour. I'll do those only. And they just sort of like craft their own life that maybe doesn't include, you know, high spending, but includes a lot more free time. And so I think that's the adaptation I see happening

is people living in low living a lower cost lifestyle lowering their monthly nut and then using gig work to supplement and then you know whatever five six people living in a house in a more modern family way lower carbon emissions

let's go yeah de growth for the win it's so hard the chess board is moving so dynamically right now yeah but I'll just tell you the things I came to

with my own work from home stuff briefly. If you want to work from home, you need to, it's your responsibility to work from home employees. All work from home employees who want to remain remote should adhere to these so they can keep remote work. You must have an office, a space with a closed door, proper lighting, proper Zoom set up. Okay. That's illegal. You have to have somewhere. You're going to require people to be able to afford two-bedroom apartments? Really? No. No. You could put up a screen behind, you could be in your one bedroom. What I'm talking about is people who are, have their kids with them

and they're in the living room and there's people walking behind them those kind of situations are what tweak managers who don't want people to work for both. What if you can't do anything about that? Sure, you can.

If you have a bedroom, you can set up a space. What if you don't have a bedroom? Oh, you live in a studio apartment? Yes. If you're alone in a studio apartment, it'd be fine. Anyway, the point is, you cannot dictate people's housing. Oh, yeah, you can.

Actually, they will. It is required to have a quiet room if you want to be a customer support rep, like a JetBlue and those kind of things. If you don't have a room with a closed door, that was the rule for JetBlue, then you can come to one of the call centers. And that is going to be one of the key things here.

Second, have Ethernet, and you got to have childcare. This is another thing that's tweaking managers. People are not having childcare, having kids at home during the day. I've had this situation a couple of times where I lost child care. Mom's like, sorry, you're screwed. Well, if you don't have child care, you can't take care of a kid

and be on calls at the same time, dad or mom, I've been in the situation. It's just impossible. Now, at a certain age kids, they can take care of themselves, whatever. If they're 12-year-olds, that's different. I'm talking about, like, babies. I'm just saying, you're going to get sued.

If you're telling people you have to, not you personally, I'm just saying, if you're telling people you have to have child care, what does that mean? You have to have child care. Your child care can never get sick. No, no, you can't be working from home on phone calls with a kid on your lap in an open space.

So these are the requirements that are going to become codified. I believe. You're going to have to have a perfect setup with Ethernet. You're going to have to have a quiet room with a closed door. You have to have child care. And you're going to have to work a specific block of time. And some of these things are already in place. And they have been in place for years. So like for customer support reps, that's what I remember talking to the, because it was a radical idea to let people work from home 20 years ago. And JetBlue did that. And they said, this is the, you know, the what they call, covenants? These are the covenants. You got to have child care. You can't be on the phone, like helping somebody and then have a kid screaming in the background. So quiet room, door locked. and, you know, proper headset, yada, yada. Proper, you know, Ethernet, like I always talk about. And so, and then I think the time block is super important. Because what's happening now is people are making their own hours and then people are not overlapping. So it doesn't need to be everybody works the same eight hours.

But organizations need to come up with like a four hour block or a five hour block that everybody says, hey, 10 to three, we're all going to be online at the same time so we can collaborate as opposed to, you know, whatever. Now, that's going to be difficult, you know, if you happen to live out of the three hours. continental United States. But again, if that's your decision as a remote worker, you're going to have to make that agreement or go into an office or work for a company in your time zone. So I think that these are the, again, back to second and third order effects, I think these are the things that will make remote work permanent. So to the extent people want this to be a permanent thing, the people who are working remote need to think about what is tweaking the employer and reverse it, right? This is my advice to that side. Yeah. Well, I hear you, but I think

you're also saying the only person who has any input in power here is the manager, right? Like, if I get my work done, is it my problem that the manager is tweaked? Well, um, like if you, if your goal is outcomes, right? And you get those outcomes, then you might not like the appearance of the child on the Zoom. Right. But if there is no evidence whatsoever that that has been a problem, then, you know, you're still putting all the power in the hand of, like, what I'm, what I'm, saying is when you start to see the, no, see, you're saying the employer has all the power and the person is your property. It's a contract. No, I'd say that. I was a contract. No, I was about

to recognize what you're saying and saying both parties have to opt in. I was actually going to say the opposite, which is, you know, it's like, or don't take the job, right? So what, what I see happening is what happened in the call center space. That was the only at scale. But call centers are such a specific kind of job. It is. And that job, I think, they figure it how to make it work because you could trust the person wasn't screwing around because you saw the number of calls they're doing. You could, you, then they set this sort of system up. They even have desktop monitoring.

So like your entire system is monitored. I'm not an advocate of that. I think that's like kind of creepy. But I do think that this is where this is headed because of the overwork.com, overwork subreddit and all this stuff is that managers who can't figure this out and employees who are going to ruin it for everybody else and then there just has to be some contract made, like a social contract to bridge those two extremes. I'm not saying I, this is what I'm doing. I'm doing something very different here, but I just hire A players and fire

people who are B players. I have a different approach to that. If you're a B player, you can't be on this team, you're going to be a freelancer. And freelancers might love that, right? Like, even at inside, I have this. We have full-time people writing newsletters. Some people, I won't call them B-players, they just want more freedom. And I just say, okay, we'll just pay you per newsletter. And people like, you will? And I'm like, well, why wouldn't I? Like, right? Right. Don't have to pay your benefits. You get to pick your hours within reason.

What most managers, what most, like people, the best managers I've ever encountered are the ones who can recognize the skills of an individual and, and make accommodations to make that individual successful, understanding that those accommodations may not be available to someone who's less successful. Most managers, most people don't want to do that. It's more work. Like, it is way easier to have one solution that solves every issue, you think, right? you will normalize performance in some ways. You'll get less out of your high performers and maybe more out of your low performers by having a one-size-fits-all response.

And we have always wanted to sort of avoid having to manage individuals. And at really, really big companies, it's very hard. So you can imagine why you just go straight to policy because it's a lot easier to handle. That's what I'm trying to say. What do you think the reasonable policies are

to address these concerns? I think it's going to just also be some contractual stuff in HR. Whereas if, you know, specifically with this idea of like, you have to clear work with your boss. If you're going to do outside work, you know,

it's not legal for you do, but you do have to clear it. I mean, I have that policy. If people want to take outside jobs here, just let me know. I think actually, yeah, people who are.

That's super standard. Yeah. Super standard. So it's going to be interesting to watch. I think that's all super standard. And I think it's going to be, it's a higher bar for managing is what it really is. It has been,

you know what? Once you get into the rhythm of it, I'm in the rhythm of it now. I have solved it. I, the other innovation I came out with. is co-working. Or, what do they call it when you're working together,

but not necessarily in a meeting? Parallel. Like you're on a huddle and you're, there's a term for this. Rachel says it's co-working. It is, yeah. It's kind of like when kids do what's called parallel play. So they'll have like kids at a table.

Yeah, my brother and I used to do this with Bulls games. When I was younger and living in Omaha and he was in North Dakota, he would call me and we would just sit on the phone on long distance because we didn't know any better for hours. and just watch the bold game. Sure. We wouldn't talk. We would just watch the game

and then like cheer when something happened or whatever. That's basically what our production team does all the time. This, what Malcolm Gladwell was talking about, this disconnect can be solved. So I'm doing tests at inside.com now. Instead of having people, we would have three people writing three newsletters.

And I said, I want you to run an experiment. Have those three people on a huddle for people who don't know that's just audio only on Slack. Or you could do a Zoom. And you could have your camera off or blur, whatever. You don't have to be on camera the whole time.

I know that could be creepy for people. But have three. and each of these inside newsletters has seven stories in it. So three newsletters is 21 objects, if you think about it. Little short summaries in the format I created. So have three people do two, you know, one person does three stories for inside NFTs. Then they move on to inside crypto. Then they move on to inside podcasting.

But they work as a group. And they say, oh, I'm going to do this story. This looks the most interesting. And then somebody else says, oh, we did that yesterday. And they say, oh, okay, let me read it and make sure. Okay, yeah, you know what? There's no new news. All right, I'm going to do this one.

And they say, oh, okay, great. I was thinking about that one. I'll do this one. And then they say, okay, I'm done with this one. I'm moving on to this one. So there's no manager involved. Nobody's like, did you get this done? How many minutes does it take?

But you're working as a group together to craft a newsletter like we do here crafting a podcast. It's more fun. And you feel less isolated and you feel like you're part of something. Right. And so I think this is what employers. Like there are a million ways to do this that don't involve some old version grafted on to some new, you know, it doesn't have. This is a completely new version of it.

It doesn't have to reinvent that. Yeah, it is. It's a total adaptation. That's a great word for it. Yeah. It's like you're, you're breaking apart work and then saying, how do I make this like a barn raising?

How do I make this like we're all painting the fence together, but virtually. Yeah. And I'm finding like, it's actually jazzing people up and it's, we're getting to know our writers better. And then they're making each other better. So like you could go run alone for seven miles,

where you could run with two other people for seven miles, which is going to be better. Kind of better to run with other people. I think. And so this is what I encourage people to do is look for opportunities like that to co-work or parallel play or parallel projects. All right, I think we talked about this for a lot. I know, we really have. All right, everybody, that is the future of remote work, a topic you thought was dead, but is only, tell us what you think. What's working for your, I would like to hear from people what's working for their company. If they have any hacks or techniques,

I'm always thinking, you know, I'm always thinking about the path forward and what are the good techniques. Yeah. And who, like, what are the second and third order effects? I think this is going to be tremendous on mentoring people, you know? We do it here. This weekend startups does a huddle in the morning where they talk about the news and I think that changed everything, right? Nick, it made it more fun. You guys get to know each other.

Develop some friendships. It was definitely good. Yeah. All right. Well, listen, speaking of a gig work, I saw some kind of deal between DoorDash and Meta. Maybe you could tee this up for us, my mind. Exactly. Speaking, we are going to talk about other news today because we didn't get to this yesterday

and it's super interesting. On Monday, DoorDash and Meta announced this partnership where DoorDash drivers will now deliver items purchased through Facebook Marketplace. So if you're not familiar with Facebook Marketplace, it's basically new Craigslist or kind of like Nextdoor, people sell all kinds of stuff. A lot of it is I find like there's like drop shipping type stuff where they just sort of order it from China as soon as you order it. But it's also a lot of people sell reselling stuff, circular economy kind of thing. And the biggest, and Facebook has, it really pushes you. If you ever sell anything on Facebook Marketplace, they really, really push you to offer delivery,

which is hard in some cases. And now they're partnering with DoorDash to just make this delivery thing super easy, which I think is fascinating because I think that marketplace, Facebook marketplace, is like the silent killer. This thing is quietly huge.

And it's all used goods where are people using it like Etsy and eBay where eventually people, you know, were selling brand new socks on it and they were kind of creating like Shopify kind of stores is becoming like a Shopify type of competitor? I think it's,

definitely a Shopify competitor. Like, people started out selling you stuff and you can definitely find that there. That exists. You can buy somebody's old, you know, there's a lot of that. But I also, like, I bought a gardening bench and then I was like, oh, this is clearly just a drop ship thing where multiple vendors are selling the exact same garden bench that they just order from one factory in China as soon as they get an order. But there's a little bit of everything in there. And, you know, this is totally random. But when I was on vacation, I was stand-up paddleboarding with a guy from Iowa, like you do at a resort in Mexico. And he, I was, oh, I was. Oh, I was saying you should get, because he was like, this is really fun.

I should get a paddleboard. And I'm like, dude, you got to go inflatable. Those things are awesome. Da, da, da, da. And then he's like, I wonder if I could find one on Facebook Marketplace. Wow. Everybody I know only shops on Facebook Marketplace these days. That's what he said.

Yeah, he's like, it's huge. Awesome. Everybody, like, you check there first and then you look somewhere else for stuff. It's kind of like a super app concept when you think about it. So now DoorDash will be doing deliveries for things bought on the Facebook marketplace. Is that the headline I saw go by? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So if you buy it on Facebook Marketplace,

and then presumably if you're a seller, you would be able to offer it a little more cheaply. Yeah, this has to do with Tony. Tony from DoorDash, where I remember meeting when he was launching it, and they were real serious hackers. And I'm friendly with Stanley, the other co-founder. We play cards together sometimes.

He plays cards on a lot of live streams now. But Tony is on Facebook's board, and he's friends with Zuck. So this is an inside job. this is an inside job it's an inside job and so what this really is is great for

DoorDash because it gives their drivers one more thing to do right one more way to make money it totally does and it enables more sellers on marketplace because they I think what they have probably found is the ones that offer delivery are obviously the most popular right like

yes I drove all the way to Albany to pick up a like cute rug that I bought on next door this weekend but I didn't want to if I didn't want to if I could have gotten it delivered for like the same prices getting you know Chinese food on DoorDash I definitely would have done it so the service basically uh will let people deliver anything that can fit in a car trunk and they're up to 15 miles away so in terms of enabling circular economy and reselling stuff amazing great brilliant deal look out for facebook marketplace silent killer fascinating I guess the loser in this is Craigslist I guess people or eBay yeah and next door and And possibly Etsy and Shopify, you know, I mean, this is the new store. This is right.

This, like, don't sleep on Facebook marketplace. This is a way bigger deal than the Metaverse. Like, this is their, this is an Amazon competitor. Well, if Amazon is going to do advertising, then why wouldn't Facebook, you know, start selling stuff, right? And this is why, you know, when you get to a certain scale, everything kind of is trending towards a super app where all services will offer all things, right? But this is why I think, you know, I'm still a large shareholder in Uber, or it's still my

largest position of all public companies. And I really am impressed with, like, that they put on the gold belly type business. And I'd like to see them keep pulling that string and see where it leads them. I very much would like to see more hotels and event ticketing and that kind of stuff on the Uber app. I think that would be extraordinary. They already do delivery. I literally was in a situation where somebody had forgotten their passport.

And they didn't know that Uber did this, but in Uber, there's a delivery. And you just click delivery, and the person comes and picks it up, and they give you a receipt, and you sign for it. And so people don't know Uber does this, but when you're on the main interface, it just says they're delivery. So you can already, if you're a Facebook merchant, just click delivery and do it there. But this will be integrated into the transaction, I'm assuming. Probably, yeah. All right. Just an update on a quick J-Trade update.

People saw that. wondering. People have been wondering. Dan Loeb from Third Point bought on Monday a billion dollars in Disney shares. Of course, he's Dan Loeb, one of the great investors of this generation and clearly watching J-trading like a hawk. And he followed me into the Disney trade. But he's an activist. Disney shares jumped. And you know, I think I had bought 250. And one of my thesis, my thesis on this J-trading was, hey, if we find great companies, we want to, over time, increase our position. And then we had 250 shares of Disney.

But I saw the Dan Loeb's enthusiasm and thought, time to quadruple down. So incoming J-Trade. J-Trade Alert. I bought another 750 shares. So I think it might be my largest position now. Damn. It's getting up there.

Loeb-making moves to. He wrote a note to Disney CEO Bob Chapet. are the glasses coming out? Is it happening? Is it happening? It's literally trying to read it. I'm not going to do it. He already bought it, but it's not a live share.

I bought it a couple days ago, yeah. But yesterday I bought it. So what do you think about these moves then? So you're buying on the theory that, A, Disney's going to continue to get strong, but also that Daniel Lobes moves, such as encouraging Bob Chapec to spin off ESPN, and some of his activist moves

are going to be to the good of Disney to the benefit? Yeah, I think generally speaking, when a smart person gets involved and buys a position and they have influence, great. And he wants the shares to go up in value, right? This is, you know, not, this is not me buying shares. This is somebody who is like a professional investor who is doing this for a living who really wants to make money. So yeah, I think it builds my thesis that this is an undervalued, tremendously important company. I could see ESPN, the spinning out of ESPN to me would be great because we would get shares in ESPN. Then we would have management at ESPN that would just go for it, right?

You know, it's like when eBay spun out PayPal, as he mentions here, he says, we believe that most of ranges between the two companies can be replicated contractually in a way eBay spun PayPal will continue to utilize the product to process payments. He also urged Tappick to rush to complete the Hulu acquisition. which would be great, right? Comcast has an agreement to sell 33% stake in Hulu to Disney in two years. So it might as well do it now. Anyway, that was great. And okay, so in other J trading news, I don't know what's going on, but Stitchfix is up 24%. I'm not sure what my cost basis is here, but if I had my grandpa glasses, I could actually read my screen, but I don't. I mean, this is the problem with the Robin Hood. I literally cannot read my Robin Hood here.

What was that hilarious thing you said the other day? You had to be a falcon. I don't know. Anyway, let's see. I'm looking. Shares of Stitch Fix. I bought 5,000 shares at $6.27 average. I am up 40%. I think I'm up like 40%. Yeah. I'm looking at the Motley Fool on what happened. Investors are saying they may have been too hasty in abandoning this apparel stock. Pretty great. Also, if you are required to go back to work, I'm just saying, you know what you really need? What? New clothes. that a stylist picked out for you because you have no freaking idea what to wear

I think yeah but anyway looks like the J-trading portfolio was doing great except for Warner Brothers Disney which we'll get to anything on tap for tomorrow we should talk

so anyway check in on Stitch Fix or there's not investing advice it's just me learning in public although I am getting a lot of inbound about me learning in public I don't know if you saw like a lot of people are sending me tips

like hey check out this stock or check out this stock people love learning in public like I would say probably the number one comment that I get is that people love the VC Sunday school. And then what they, people really like basic vulnerability, like the ability to say, I do not know anything.

Yes. And let's all learn that thing together. Shouldn't be so difficult in the world. But people, it's really helpful. Like, I always felt as a journalist that it was the most useful and even on VC Sunday school to be able to just say like, I'm going to just ask the dumb question because somebody out there doesn't know. Yeah.

I mean, a lot of people are telling me the strategies of like, hey, you should be putting puts and calls and this on these trades and I'm like, seems very complicated, but maybe I will learn how to do one of those. Like,

oh yeah, if you're buying the shares and you believe it's going to go up, then you could do this to protect your downside, or you could do this to optimize your upside. Have you ever done any of these

puts and calls and shorted anything? Oh God, no, I'm too stupid for that. Are you kidding? I never, well, I mean,

it's just like a gambling technique that I think I want to learn. So we could all learn in public. I just keep reading the Kalshi article on how to hedge. Like I'm super into the hedging

against real world things on Cali. I'm still, that's as complicated as I'm, that's where I'm going right now. I've become a little obsessed with Cali. Interesting. So while you, I have not yet, I have funded my Calci account, but I haven't done anything.

I haven't bought any contracts yet, but I'm like real interested in this hedging. So we could start making Calci bets on the pond. Maybe we can start making Calci bets. I'm into that. Maybe they need to sponsor the pod. Shout out Cali. Maybe if we, uh,

It's pretty awesome. I'm obsessed with it. As a source of data and just an interesting, like, yeah, I'm... Well, here's the thing. When you place bets. Here's my theory. And this has been proven. When you place bets, you have skin in the game, you learn faster.

Kind of like if you're going to learn how to fight and you get punched in the face and you're boxing, you actually get hit, you kind of learn to block and to not get hit. So, you know, the lessons, I think, come faster and you learn them deeper. Yeah. Kind of like playing poker. Like, if you're playing poker for no money, it's like you don't really learn anything, but you start playing for money, you're like, ah, how did I make that mistake? So again, I want to start, you know, just continuing to learn how to make these financial bets. And I like this idea of making bets based on world events.

And because that would mean you'd learn more macro, right? Right. You see making macro bets. And I think pretty interesting. And I think predictive markets are so interesting. I'm so into predictive markets. Yeah, I think I may get in on this with you. If you have any ideas of predictive markets,

that would be a good place to do this. You can, of course, email producers at this week in startups. The other thing is we had a crypto roundtable. I don't know if you got a chance to listen to it last week with Vinny Langham and Sandeep Madra. So we're not going to do that next week, but we'll do it the week after.

And so you can join me, Molly, on that. And then the four of us will talk about crypto. Because these guys are actually, like, doing work and building companies. I actually may want to jade some crypto. So I was like, hey, what's going on with Doge? Because I checked out this My Doge app that Bill Lee made.

and they're like, you know, they add 5% to the supply of Doge every year so it's not like an appreciating asset in that way in all likelihood. It's going to be more like currency. You know, like you use it more than... Right. You actually use it. So I was like, oh, okay, I didn't even think about that, right?

I don't know about supply and demand of these things, but that could be an interesting thing too is to kind of learn if actually... I think my thesis is out of the mortgage comes. I'm going to put my teeny tiny portfolio at risk here. It's not going away. It's not going to zero. It's not going away.

I liked Howard Linson's comments on Friday where he said, like, it's just more internet. And I was like, that's the best framing for this. Like, these are new features of the internet. Stop calling a Web3. Stop calling it. It's just more internet. Yeah. And more internet, if NFTs, you know, have certain rights or smart contracts.

Like, yeah, smart contracts are like, okay, yeah, you have a website and you can put a smart contract in it and it goes to this network and it gets executed and nobody has a say in it, right? Like it just, there's some Oracle that tells you the price of, we made a bet on the temperature, right? Mm-hmm. Where I made a bet on how much snow there was going to be this year, right? And I bet, if I bet $1,000 that we're going to have a really terrible snowfall,

and I win that bet. Yeah. I get $1,000 and I use it to go fly somewhere with this good snow. Yep. If we have record snowfall and I lose it, I had record snowfall and I got to do all the skiing I wanted to do. So it's, I was just thinking like, wow, could I place that bet of the number of, you know, of feet of snow in Tahoe this year.

If I win, if I lose, I win. Yeah. Because there's snow for me to ski on. That's why I'm so into the hedge thing. And if I lose, I take the winnings and I go to Park City. Like the example that he gave, the example that Kalshi gives in its little tutorial is like, let's say you have tickets to a baseball game, you spend $100 bucks on them and there's a 50% chance of rain or a 70% chance of rain. And if it doesn't, if it rains, you're going to lose your $100 because you're not going to go to the game.

So you could go on Kalshi instead and buy contracts, you know, You spend $10 to buy $100 to win $100 on something that's a pretty sure bet, like a 90%. You know, you take the, you take the most likely outcome. So then if it rains, you don't lose $100 because you make it on your cash contract. And if it doesn't rain, then you're in the money on both sides. So interesting. Super interesting. All right, everybody.

So more market manipulation ahead. Yay. This is not investment advice. It's not investment advice. We'll be back tomorrow with more news. and another episode of everybody's other new favorite about learning in public, the blueprint. Oh, is the blueprint back tomorrow?

Great. Oh, and by the way, I might have a leak. It can't confirm this, Molly. But I think I've been getting some DMs from somebody inside of Adam Newman's company. There's somebody inside. It could be somebody around or inside his organization. I don't actually know.

But they've been leaking to me some future plans. And I got to check. I think because we're doing journalism here and I think some of this information is quasi-public. I'm going to have to check with some attorneys. Embargo. But tomorrow I'm going to share one of the future plans for Adam Newman's flow. He's actually got some product

extensions and somebody told me about one of them. And so I'm going to share it with you tomorrow. It's going to be amazing, everyone. Don't miss it.