This Week in Startups - Direct listing rule change, Notion AI demo, NYE planning & more | E1646

Episode Date: December 27, 2022

J+M kick off the show by discussing some approved changes to direct listings, which will make it easier for companies going public via direct listings to raise money! (1:18) Then, LAUNCH team member Charlie Cuddy joins Molly to demo Notion's new AI tool (14:07). Finally, Producer Rachel joins Molly to break down which popular consumer apps and tools to use to plan a last-minute NYE party. (33:12) (0:00) Molly intros today's segments! (1:18) J+M discuss the approved changes to direct listings, and how this might impact companies going public in 2023 (12:33) Crowdbotics - Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at https://crowdbotics.com/twist (14:07) LAUNCH team member Charlie Cuddy joins Molly to demo Notion AI! (31:58) LinkedIn Jobs - Post your first job for free at https://linkedin.com/twist (33:12) Producer Rachel joins Molly to break down which popular consumer apps and tools to use to plan a last-minute NYE party! (41:12) Founder University - Apply at https://course.founder.university (42:52) Rachel and Molly discuss the best gig work apps, playlist tools, sober-curious beverages, and more! FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1

Hey, everybody, welcome back. I hope you had a wonderful holiday. Christmas is over. Hanukkah is over. We're preparing for the new year. Shake off the hangover. We have a fun variety show teed up for you today. A little bit of news on new SEC rules about direct listings,

which could be very impactful in 2023. Then our resident Notion expert, Charlie Cuddy, joins me to break down the new Notion AI tool. You thought ChatGPT was cool? This is actually amazing. And then producer Rachel comes on for a fun segment on how to plan a modern New Year's Eve party Gen Z style. We got some good new apps for you. Those include a startup called Partifle and an old app, but how to create the ultimate party playlist on Spotify and a little bit more.

It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by CrowdBotics. Great ideas can change the world. And CrowdBotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code. get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com slash twist and LinkedIn jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Post your first job for free at LinkedIn.com slash twist.

All right, everybody, let's kick off the show with a little bit of news and news that actually we, there's been so much going on that we've had to wait to talk about this one, but it's kind of an interesting setup for 2023 because big news in capital markets is that the SEC has approved a request by NASDAQ to expand the limits on capital raises for direct listings, i.e. make it easier to go public via direct listing. And the New York Stock Exchange has a similar proposal that is also expected to be approved. And of course, the main reason for this happening, streamlining direct listings versus traditional IPOs is because we need to. some more freaking IPOs, people. Yeah, and direct listings, don't require a bank. You just put your shares out

to the market. Anybody can trade and the price discovery is all done in a little bit more of an elegant fashion. The banks don't get to control the process. I mean, Bill Gurley's been talking about the wealth transfer that happens when a stock pops. If you were selling,

you know, whatever shares of Uber or Airbnb, you know, and the stock doubles in the first day, that means the company got half the value of those shares and there's all kinds of shenanigans that go on. I know I've been on the other side of it where people offer you friends and family shares in a company

where they give people early access to IPOs who are banking clients, et cetera, et cetera. So not to mention how much it costs to go public. I mean, now companies wait to go public until their Series O, series R, series W at this point. But one of the reasons you could imagine waiting

so long is because it can cost you $750,000. to do a traditional IPO process. And this now allows you, when you did a direct listing, you weren't allowed to sell new shares as part of that. But I think the SEC rightfully just looked at this and said,

hey, if you're going to do a direct listing, which I think Spotify did. Spotify did. Slack did the big one. Slack did one. You can also raise money with it. Okay, so previously with a direct listing, you would just be public.

You would set a share price and be public, but you didn't issue any new shares, meaning you could not raise new capital. It just sort of meant, you're public now, but it was easier. And then if your share price went up after you were public, then you raised capital that way,

as opposed to having a fresh injection. You wouldn't do it at the same time. But now you don't need banks to do this. You can just go public. You list your shares. They're available. Coinbase did it, it's flacted at Roblock, Warby Parker Palantier.

The direct listings are more efficient and they're fair because everybody then isn't locked up and you don't have this flipping of shares. So the thing that was also unfair was, according to most people, the banks who are controlling these IPO process, they would give their clients or themselves these shares. Then the employees who have been working on the company for 10 years

and working at Slack for 10 years or Spotify for 10 years, they have to wait six months. And then these other people during that six-month period are flipping and they're getting the IPO price and the pops happening so they underprice it. And what you really want is just better price discovery. You want the accurate price. And you also want to be able to raise some shares and sell some.

So just another option for people if they don't want to use a bank to run the process is my best understanding of this. Yeah. And also to solve in some ways the like sprinkle some rainfall on the IPO drought, I would assume. Like maybe it's an incentive for more companies to go public. I don't know. In 2022, in 2021 over a thousand companies went public and raised something like $339 billion on US exchanges. In 2022, I mean, this. is just a shocking drop-off.

207 companies went public. That's down, that number is down 80% year over year. And those companies raised between them about $24 billion. That number's down 93% year over year. Would this be an incentive, do you think, for companies to go public earlier? Sure. Yeah,

I think it's just, you know, like SPACs, you know, direct listings are just another option. And I think they will make it more fluid for people to go public. And because they can raise money, they'll do this as well. You don't need to have the banks running around doing this stuff. You can just list your shares.

If people want to trade them, they can. So it gives you the ability to have liquidity for the shareholders, which include employees, early investors, and the founders. And that seems more fair. You don't have to go through a huge process. If you want to raise some money, you can. If you don't, you don't have to. So we need more opportunities to get more companies public.

Roughly, there's half as many companies, even with this like, you know, a bunch of SPACs and a bunch of companies going public. over the last couple years, we're still far behind the peak number of companies that were public. And so what the corollary to people becoming bagholders or, you know, the counter argument to like, oh, you shouldn't buy these specs is, well, then the public misses out on the ability to get in early on an Uber

or an Airbnb or a Coinbase or a Slack because, you know, they went public so late. So there is going to be a balance here. There's always going to be some inventory of public companies that are lower quality, and then there are going to be some that are gems, and that's really part of the process of going public is the discipline

of having this wider group of shareholders and the discipline of every day your company being valued by a large group of shareholders. That creates massive discipline. It creates price discovery. It also creates opportunity. That's why people need to be educated when buying these things.

If you're going to buy a company that's in space travel or the 18th EV company like FISC or whatever, You know, you're going to have to think, okay, do I think VTOLs, Joby, do I think, you know, Virgin Galactic space travel for tourism? Do I think Fisker or Nicola, you know, entrepreneurs who you might have some concerns about, you know, do you want to place those bets? And if you do, you might want to, if it's something that's really future tech, you might want to make a small bet. VTOLs, space travel. You know, okay, if you're really into it, make a small bet.

or you look at management, you know, like 18th, 19th, 20th, EV company, like how are they going to beat Ford and Tesla? Like, really? Like,

kind of hard. Walk me through the, for those who are not familiar, including me, walk me through what Bill Gurley has been saying about IPOs. Is it the, is the primary complaint about IPOs the cost or is it this kind of unfairness?

It's that banks really control the pricing and that lets insiders benefit maybe more than investors and founders and employers and employees. So traditional IPOs, the bankers get to make too much money. So Bill Gurley has said, if you can get the company out by a direct listing and everybody can trade the shares immediately, that's unquestionably better for the shareholders who built that company. If a bank does it, well, then they have an incentive to keep the price low, make it pop,

to make their customers, you know, make an instant return, flip the shares, et cetera, and that's a massive cost. Because the six-month lockup period after an IPO is not applied equally. Not everybody else to abide by it. And then the fees. And then all the fees. The fees are crazy. Right. Exactly. The bank's charge.

So you should be able to, you know, just list your shares on Robin Hood. Like, and e-trade. Like, if I have a company, it's got a billion shares. Let's say it's got a billion shares and they're trading at a dollar each. Like, why do I need a bank to start trading those? seems kind of antiquated, right? Like, why do I have to go through this process? What if I'm not trying to get a bunch of new investors in onto the cap table, which is what

the banks do? They do that roadshow. They introduce you to a bunch of investors, those investors buy chunks of your company. Well, what if you're like, I have a profitable company. I have tons of cash in the bank. I just want to be public in your six or seven as Slack with, you know, whatever, 25 or 50 million, or if Canva wanted to be public right now, they could just be public. Float 10% of the shares.

A hundred million shares are available for a dollar age. people can trade in and out of them, but we don't need to raise money. Or we're going to raise just a small amount. We're going to put 900 million shares out there, and we're going to sell 100 million shares for a dollar each. That gets us to a billion shares. But we'll sell them for a dollar each, whatever the market will bear. That is a lot fairer than having a bank do it and then losing control of the process.

So it's about control. It's about cost and fees. And it's about all these little nuanced ways that banks extract value while the people who built the company are at a disadvantage, which is profoundly unfair. Yeah, I love it. Direct listings are like the Bitcoin of the going public process. Like, it really is about decentralization and taking out the middleman because all banks are here at this point, right? And you could argue that they, the service, they are hired to perform is to help you with that price discovery, is to use their expertise to, you know, take you out with the most opportunity of success possible.

but also, you know, they take 5.4% of gross proceeds from the offerings, apparently. That's the problem. It's like, what's reasonable here. And, you know, people should have the ability to just list them. And, you know, I think that is one of the promises of crypto. That was, you know, a valid reason to get excited. What if you could take a venture fund and just say, you know, each percentage ownership in that $100 million fund was available on the blockchain?

and then as the fund grew, people could sell in and out of it. So you were in year zero of the fund. It got to year seven. Your 1% in the $100 million fund you put a million dollars in is now worth $2 million. You say, you know what?

I want to cash out now. Somebody else says, well, you know what? I'll give you 1.8 for that. I want a 10% discount because I actually believe in what's in the portfolio. And I'll get you out of that position. And that ability to get in and out of positions fluidly at low cost,

that is the beauty of I think the decentralized or more fluid crypto vision of the world. And direct listings are in some ways analogous to that, I guess. Sure. A little bit. A little bit. You're still using banks. Like, it's still financial markets.

But it is a bit of this decoupling from the middleman. Get the middleman out. Which we saw with Spacks. Like, I feel like Silicon Valley has been trying to reform the IPO for a long time. Like you have Eric Rees with the long-term stock exchange. Yes. Even IEX was a part of that trying to sort of like get rid of the, um, implement the speed bump to get rid of some of the front running advantages or disadvantages.

So there's like a lot of attempts to reform this process. And this is clearly in favor of founders and investors and employees. This was one of the few things that a traditional IPO where a banker takes you on the road and sells your shares, this was the one piece. This was the one criticism of a direct IPO is that you couldn't raise money in the process of doing a direct listing. Right. Now you can, I guess. Yeah, they have approved it. So the SEC approved.

the NASDAX request and then New York Stock Exchange has a similar one in the works that's expected to be approved since they approve the other one. So yeah, it's going to be, it's a whole new year. Yeah, fantastic. Congratulations to Bill Gurley and the people who worked on this, right? More competition, always good for the market. Yeah. So, yeah, and over those fees, obviously. The future is decentralized. Do you have a great idea, but you don't have a technical co-founder? Well, boom, crowdbotics is your CTO as a service. You know how it is. A lot of times, these amazing ideas you have, well, they fell in the planning phase. CrowdBotics will make sure that doesn't happen to you.

They offer pre-built app templates to help you build your MVP, your first version of your product faster than anybody else can. This means you can stop building from scratch and start using the same architecture that all the industry leaders do. There's no reason to reinvent the wheels, not when you have a great partner like crowdbotics. You can go from idea to spec and spec. to code super easily because they do this for a living. And if you're not sure where to start,

well, CrowdBotics offers professional scoping. This helps you flesh out your project at the MVP stage and beyond. And here's why CrowdBotics really gets this done in an awesome fashion. They have automated DevOps, maintenance, security updates, and App Store publishing. You don't have to worry about all that blocking and tackling. They do it right from the start. And the best part is you own the source code. You own the IP.

So let the folks at CrowdBotics show you how all this works. You can schedule a free scoping session and get your detailed build plan done. Buy CrowdBOTics at CrowdBOTX.com slash Twist. That's CrowdBOTICS.com slash Twist. Again, it's free. You got nothing to lose and you got everything to gain. CrowdBotics.com slash twist. All right.

Next up, we have our own Charlie Cuddy joining to give us an incredible demo. Notion, the database and blogging and kind of web creation tool that all the startups love has a new amazing AI assistant. And Charlie is going to come on and show us how to use it to pretty much start a business. Okay, we're getting ready for 2023 in all kinds of ways on today's show. We have been talking obviously all through 2022, especially the last couple of months, a lot about generative AI. Text to Image with Dolly 2, stable diffusion. There's Chad. coming out and writing everybody's end of the year papers for them and a lot more. It seems like in the upcoming year, these tools are going to go supernova.

And here's just one example that kind of flew under the radar. Back in November, Notion, the note-taking and database app that all the startups are using, introduced Notion AI. They're currently working through a massive wait list to onboard people. But our in-house Notion guru, Charlie Cuddy, who you probably know from Founder University was one of the earliest people allowed on the service. So we got him on despite his strep throat and misery to give us a quick demo. Come on, Charlie, come on in.

Hey, Molly. Hey. Thank you for doing this. I appreciate it. We should, I guess we should start. Okay, can you give us a little explainer about Notion for those who are not using? There are 30 million people using Notion. It's kind of a darling in the startup world, but not everybody knows what it does.

Yeah, it's really a no-code. platform that allows you to work cross teams really quickly. Some of the most powerful features, in my opinion, are the database capabilities where you can create all these different databases that can then be tagged or using different formulas to do just about anything you want, creating different views. I mean, we use it internally, obviously for a lot of stuff, whether it's Twist or our investment team.

Those are some of the big ones. but it also really quickly can stand up landing pages and share them publicly to the web. Just a lot of speed to get things out the door and help with organization as well. Yeah, massively efficient. All right. And then Notion AI, so chat GPT,

which we've all been going crazy for, as like a couple of million users that we know of. It's sort of creeping into the public consciousness, but it's a test, right? It's a beta right now. Notion AI is built right into the product. And Charlie is going to show us how. We're just going to use one example that I think is relevant to our audience,

which is how to use Notion to take a person from big tech employee to full-fledged founder. And we've got that screen up. Okay, let's do this. Let's say Charlie is a high paid employee working at a big tech company, but you want to start a company. Where would you start? Yeah. So right here in Notion, just with a backslash and maybe just to kind of set the stage, There's a lot of different AI prompts.

We'll work through some of these here as we kind of narrate this story. But one of the things we could do is to create a pros and cons list. I have a high paying tech job, but am interested in starting my own startup. What are the pros and cons? Amazing. All right. So pros, so it's just populating here, chat GPT style pros, having the opportunity to create something from scratch,

the potential for high rewards for success, having more control over your own destiny, the ability to learn and grow significantly, the possibility to have a larger impact on the world. I'm sold. I'm quitting this high pay job. But wait. We also have the cons. Increased risk and potential failure.

True. Long hours and hard work, financial instability in the early stages, uncertainty and potential burnout, and then a high pressure and stressful environment. I mean, I would say these are all pretty true based on what we know of founders. Yeah.

And one of the things that I think is just really fascinating with this is the ability to say, okay, this is good and keep it. And then you can actually continue or you can even just, you know, try again and have it regenerate. Like, if we were to say that we wanted to keep it here, Molly, I can come in here and ask it to continue writing. Okay. And it's just going to take what we have seen from our pros and cons list and start

just kind of breaking it down a little bit more. give us some more context, whether we want to start writing a blog post or, you know, taking this as a just general brainstorming session. So for those who are not watching the video, it wrote, despite these risks, many entrepreneurs believe that the potential rewards are worth it. With the right team, resources and focus, an AI-driven business can have a major impact on the world. I like that it assumed that's where you want to go as an AI-driven business, which you did not specify, to be clear. It can be an incredibly exciting and rewarding experience. That said, it is important to make sure that the risks are understood and managed.

A successful AI-driven business requires thoughtful planning and diligent execution. All right. So you're going to, let's say you're going to take the leap, but there's a new problem, which is that you can't think of an idea. You want to start a business, but you don't know what kind, but you do have some passions. And you know you want to start a software business, not necessarily AI, right? So we can have notion, kind of brainstorm some ideas here with me. So let's maybe say that we wanted to create a software.

I'm interested in creating a software company in the food industry. Help me brainstorm some ideas of major problems I could solve with this startup. My God. I mean, it hasn't even generated an answer yet, and I just can't even believe you could ask it that. Whoa, look at this list. So we have, I don't know, 10 ideas right off the bat. You're calling this brainstorm. So some of the ideas it suggested are create a software platform that allows restaurants

to streamline their ordering and delivery. Okay, that exists. Develop a mobile app that allows customers store to their food from their favorite restaurants. Uh-huh. Check. Create a software platform to help restaurants manage their inventories and stock levels. I'm sort of skipping through the software platform to help restaurants increase. customer loyalty, purchase gift cards for their favorite restaurants, help restaurants

track customer preference and recommend dishes. I mean, there are a ton of ideas here. Is there one that you want to keep working with? I'm trying to think here. We could also try it and see if it can regenerate some. But like I said, we can try again and essentially you can add a little bit more context to try and help it out. Yeah, so maybe we want to just tweak the, tweak the ask here of Notion AI and take our ideas for a startup in the food industry and add in here with Loachern.

Just see if it can rewrite some of these. All right. Immediately right away goes to the onboarding. All right. So now we're getting right. Onboarding for restaurants to start using the software and AI powered system to recommend menu items. It really wants us to use AI, an AI powered chatbot, a mobile app, personalized discounts and promotions to encourage customer loyalty. Okay, any of these jumping out at you that you want to steal?

We'll grab this offering a subscription-based model to reduce churn. So I'm just going to pull this out. So we know kind of what we've selected as we continue to move through this journey. All right. So we have our idea. And we're going to call the company Cuddy Food Tech. And we're going to register it as a Delaware C-Corp. You're telling me we can do this in Notion.

I have some notes here that claim that this is what we're going to be able to do. We can. I think we just want to make sure that people creating their startups are registering as a Delaware C Corp. Oh, yeah, yeah. Got it. And helpful hint from us to you, register your startup as a Delaware C corp. But Notion can help you write this press release. So a new tech startup in the food industry.

What would we say it was? Cutty. Cutty Food Tech. Food Tech has recently launched and is offering a subscription. Based model to reduce churn. Cuddy FoodTech is looking for beta customers. Oh my God. Look at this.

All right. So we have a headline, Cudy Food Tech launch a subscription model to reduce churn. Cuddy Food Tech, a new tech startup in the food industry, has recently launched and is offering a subscription-based model to reduce churn. Cutty Food Tech is now looking for beta customers to test out their new subscription model. Customers will be able to access Cuddy Food Tech. technology, services, and products at a discounted rate.

Subscribers will also receive exclusive offers and discounts with the subscription model. Cutty Food Tech is aiming to reduce churn and increase customer loyalty. I mean, it's working with what we gave it. Totally. So maybe, again, like. Maybe we could add a little like, you know, I don't know. Yeah, let's add a little. Yeah.

What do you think here, Molly? Let's say for, are the restaurant customers the subscribers? Let's give a little bit of work to work with. Okay. If we're trying to reduce. Yeah. So customers can subscribe to their favorite restaurant for $15 a month to get discounts, easy, like reservation, priority, and free delivery.

Cutty Food Tech looks forward to providing an amazing experience for their customers and we'll be working with local restaurants to ensure a smooth transition. I like that. Yeah, totally. So really, you could just sort of say, like, we're going to prioritize local restaurants to give them a leg up and it would work with all of that information and turn into that. That's okay. Amazing.

This one gives us a nice little call to action, sign up, get the best deals, discounts, priority reservations at your favorite restaurants. Get ready to experience the best that the food industry has to offer with Cuddy Food Tech. That is amazing. It's just interesting to me how well it does at kind of changing the language a little bit, from just creating a list to actually having the feel of a little bit more formal press release. Yeah. If we were ever to get into it, the blog post features also have a slightly different kind of feel

it's not quite as formal. So it could write a press release and a blog post. It could. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. All right. And we could actually do the continue writing here. Continue writing.

Yeah. Let's see what else. And let it keep. Oh, it just will keep going. Cuddy Food Tech is committed to the best service for its customers. It's confident that the subscription model will be beneficial to both restaurants and customers alike. It gets the value of the marketplace here. Yep.

And it's just cool that as you continue writing, it knows you're trying to, you know, know that you're you're you liked what it was accepted and to continue building off of this. Right. And now it's like now it's built out a value proposition for the restaurants that we didn't even put in there by streamlining operations and reducing costs. Cutty Food Tech will enable restaurants to focus on providing the best food while customers can enjoy discounts and convenience. It gets it.

A little tangent of what this continued writing can really do that I find even more fascinies. You can actually ask it to write the HTML and CSS for a website if you wanted to give it some verbal cues for the for the actual code on that front end. And then if you continue writing, you can add in and say, okay, now make the, you know, implement JavaScript to make the buttons clickable. And it will use the context that it wrote for you in the code. What?

And then just as a reminder for people who don't use Notion, you can immediately publish that as a web page. It's, oh my Lord. This is terrifying. Okay. Let's keep going with our, with our automated business building via Notion. Now you've got Cuddy Food Tech exists. It has a press release, it's got a couple customers, but you need to hire a data scientist to sort through all this information. Yeah, so we'll just pop up a job description as one of the features here that Notion allows us quickly to do.

So let's say we are looking for a data scientist with five plus years of experience, you'd say, in Python. Okay. they are or we are looking for an individual interested in working for a moderate salary but very high equity okay so we can do here whoa okay okay so again if you're not watching this is insane we're looking for an experienced data scientist with five plus years of experience in python the successful candidate will work with our team to develop and our data-driven initiatives and strategies. The successful candidate will be comfortable working with a moderate salary, but with very

high equity. Responsibilities include develop and maintain data-driven strategies and initiatives. Collect, process, analyze, and interpret large sets of structured and unstructured data. True for this job. Utilize data analysis techniques to identify trends and insights that inform decision-making. And then it lists the qualifications and even gives examples of data visualization tools that you would need to know in order to get this job. Plus, like, qualitative requirements such as strong analytical and problem solving skills.

And just the formatting is so nice. Just title bullet points. Yeah. So you've hired because we're just going to keep going. We're just going to keep going on our tour to, oh, my God, right here. You hired a data analyst. You also hired a developer and a few sales and marketing people. And now we got to get the product team aligned with the sales team ahead of 2023.

So we're going to have Notion AI craft a meeting, a general. for us. We have a new prompt here. Yes, let's get everyone on the same page. We need to get our new developers on the same page as our sales and marketing team as we set goals for 2023. Meeting, title, getting on the same page. The purpose of this meeting is to bridge the gap between our sales and marketing teams and our new developers with the goal of setting concrete objectives for 2023. Topics discussed will include include identifying areas of overlap between the three teams,

outlining objectives for 2023, setting timelines for achieving objectives, establishing communication channels between teams, and creating an action plan for achieving goals. This is already more organized than any meeting I've had at launch. Just kidding. Wow. Okay.

All right. So we have done, but I don't know, 11 minutes of work here. and Notion AI has brainstormed an idea for a company, wrote a press release, punched it up, wrote a detailed and organized job description, so helped us get hires and then created a meeting agenda. And then that's like, what, a third of what it can do?

Yeah, like a third. I mean, especially with your journalistic background, I'm sure there's a lot of just getting the ball rolling. Like, one of the cool features I really like is like just helped me write an outline, give me some bullet points on something that, you know, get me rolling in the right direction. and then you can use that continue writing and it'll take those bullet points and start structuring it.

That's bonkers. You can write poems. Yeah, show us. Pull up just sort of the list. Let's read some of the things that we can do because I saw poem in there too and I was like, that's, okay, so we can do,

we can find action items. I'm curious about what that is, but before that blog post, pros and cons lists like we did, social media post, and outline a creative story, a poem, an essay, a meeting agenda,

a press release, job description, sales email. and even recruiting emails, sales emails? Should you try one? Yeah. Cutty Food Tech. Cutty Food Tech is selling subscriptions to your favorite restaurant. Local.

Your favorite local restaurant. Yeah. Local. We're leaning into local here. For $15 a month discount. If bought before the end of the year. Wow. Gives you a subject line.

You have a subject. Hey there, do you want to enjoy your favorite local restaurant without ever leaving your home? Now's your chance. Cuddy Food Tech is offering discounted subscriptions to your favorite local restaurant from just $15 a month, but you need to act fast to get the discount. It's only available until the end of the year. Take advantage of this offer and enjoy delicious restaurant quality meals from the comfort of your own home.

Sign up now and start enjoying delicious meals today. Dude. That's absolutely terrifying. just always getting you a nice jumping off point. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. You could even do a follow-up email if they don't reply.

Is that true? I believe we can't. I wonder if we continue writing what will happen on the email. I haven't. Hmm. I mean, we could probably play with this all day. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

You'll also get a number of other benefits such as loyalty rewards, priority, and free delivery. So I think it must have remembered that from last time. Yep. Yeah. Every time we keep it, it keeps getting smarter on the page of what we're building out. Oh, boy. All right.

Well, this is an amazing tool. I'm thrilled that Charlie, of all people, got early access to it. I don't even want to list the number of startups that are having to rewrite their business plans right now as a result of this. But it's pretty astonishing. Yeah, it's really, I just can't wait to see what it keeps evolving to. Amazing. Charlie, thank you. Go rest your voice.

Happy New Year. We appreciate you. Of course. always happy to see em Molly. Take care. Take care. Right now, every potential new hire can feel like a high-stakes wager for your small business. Your runway might be a little tighter right now, right?

And fundraising, certainly that's a little bit harder. So you want to be 100% certain that you have access to the most qualified candidates available. That's why you have to use LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find right people for your team, faster, and for free. Then you add your job to LinkedIn and you get that purple hiring frame to your LinkedIn. LinkedIn profile, that spreads the word that you're hiring. So your network sees the purple rig. What a great innovation over at LinkedIn jobs.

We love all the easy to use tools that LinkedIn gives us. That's what we do our hiring. Like screening questions, they filter out the non-serious candidate. And it's really that simple. LinkedIn is where the most qualified people are. And that's where you're going to find your next great hire, just like I do. And so go find amazing, talented candidates today. And you'll understand immediately when you get to LinkedIn jobs, why they are rated number one.

in delivering quality hires versus leading competitors. Linkin jobs helps you find the qualified candidates you want to talk to, and they help you do it faster. Post your job for free. That's right, for free. LinkedIn.com slash twist. That's LinkedIn.com slash twist to post your job for free terms and conditions apply because they're giving you something for free.

All right. I mean, I think we can all agree that AI is the story of 2023. That was bananas. Okay, next up, it's almost New Year's. And we need to plan a party the modern way. producer rachel is coming on for an awesome rachel reporting segment where we are going to band together and plan the best this weekend startup's new year's party all right we have a fun little segment for you because new years is approaching and it's time to start planning your party

if you have not already listen i'm not judging i'm a last minute party planner but also there are startups and cool gen z tech that i bet you don't know about to help you so we have rachel producer Rachel on today for like sort of a special party planning. Okay, Boomer. There she is. Super excited. I've been waiting to talk about this stuff for a while. I know.

You've been talking about Partifil, I feel like. You brought it up. I have. We have a couple. We have a whole process for you today that hopefully is going to lead. I mean, it's only Tuesday. Like, you still have time to plan your nearest party, I think. Or to decide to throw one based on this segment.

But we're going to start with a couple, like, cool startups that, that people are using. I just like, I feel so embarrassed every time I'm like that the Gen Zs are using, but I guess that's our segment. There's some of them that the Gen Zs are using. Some of them the Gen Zs are taking part on. Like there's a gig economy app we're going to be talking about that pays really well. So if you guys listen to this segment, my friends really like it.

There's also some fun drinks, your current tech stack. So let's dive in, I guess. Love it, love it. All right. So what do we have? What are the cool new apps for planning a party? First thing we have to talk about is partyful. I've probably already talked about them on the show, honestly,

because I never shut up about them. I found out about Partyful when I moved to New York, and I absolutely love them. It's basically this planning app, and the reason I like it is my phone number, none of my information gets shared. I do choose to link my Twitter account, because my Twitter account's pretty public anyway.

Oh, okay. But I love not having my information shared with the universe, because before we used these like Facebook groups and then everybody was able to see like the photos my mom tagged me in back in middle school. So that's why I like party a full. But according to Pitchbook, they raised $20 million in venture funding led by A16Z and initialized capital management back in November of this year.

And that put their pre-money valuation at an estimated $80 million. So they're doing pretty good. Okay, so how? how first of all I feel like I should ask as the boomer in the room ish boomer ish um like have you ever used evite or paperless post like what is this do that's different from i get what it's what's different from facebook which is like less sharing overall the thing that i really like about it that's different than a lot of other platforms i've used especially in its competitor space before i found out about this whole world of ticketing because i before honestly coming to new york last

year didn't know much about it, was we used a group me. So again, you could hide your phone number on that, but then everybody still gets chats and you kind of lose things along the way, Facebook, but like I said, that felt pretty invasive. And then with Partifle, you can send out text blasts so you don't even see other people in the group and you can hide attendees. And I like that a lot. I just find it to be a lot smoother of a process and a lot more private than other apps. And as you had older, and the more you realize you don't want to get spam calls, the more I feel like I try to hide my phone number.

And this also does, because I did move to New York and January of last year, it does have things that are kind of nice. Like you can add COVID precautions, like asking people to wear a mask, making sure they're vaccinated, asking that right in the invite. You can also request people to Venmo you right away. And it says, have you Venmoed Rachel?

Are you sure you've Venmoed Rachel and stuff like that? Oh, that's awesome, actually, yes. That's good. Those are some of the things that I like about this one. And it has, this, I feel like it's clutch. We're going to talk a little more about like how to gather your photos after, but this lets people upload photos. I mean, that's, again, not uncommon, but it sounds like it's like more native,

like just more built in that you can upload photos directly from the invitation. Exactly. So you can upload them before and after. If you go to the website, you can see all your past events. And if somebody uploaded photos afterwards, you can even go back and see them. What I've seen before, though, is if people upload photos, for the event, it's normally a theme event, and they're giving you kind of like ideas of what to wear.

And if it's after an event, it's people that walks around with like disposables or something, and they upload them right to there as well. And we say this a lot, but it's always super annoying, and I don't, Jason hates this a lot as well, when there's one person that doesn't have an iPhone. And this kind of takes away that awkward green message person

that pops up if it's like a text group chat or if you're sending that ICloud link. I mean, like who are, even were just like, oh, that friend. I literally have a friend who works at Google. Like, there's nothing she can do about it. Oh, right, right. It's totally fine now, too.

But it is, yeah. But we were all sitting around having, like, you know, whatever cookie night. And it was like, why can't we change the name of our group chat? And everyone's like, right. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Also, other like Gen Z friendly things, I found this amazing New York Times style, like, you know,

of course, style piece about it from September of this year saying, is this the least cringe option? to get people to your party. But it also, like, it sends text reminders, which is so much better than email. Like, even just, just the fact that sort of more legacy party platforms. And it sounds like this could be for either a big event, which is where the privacy stuff really comes in or for a small party. Totally.

Exactly. Okay. All right. So I'm done for dinner parties. The only thing that I've found that's kind of weird is, I think, and I don't know this for a fact, but I've noticed that I've gone to big events before and people, have been able to take my invite or maybe other people that have been hosts. Maybe there's a group people hosting an event.

And then they can invite me to another giant event. So recently I was invited to an event out in L.A. I don't live in L.A. I've never been to the city of L.A. I'm like, you know what? That might be a little bit of a mix-up. And I got the partyful invite and I realized one of the people hosting must have been another host at a different function I was at.

So it's my only thing is they might want to figure out how much access hosts have to the contact list, even post the party. Yeah, interesting. Also, it has cute design. It does. So let's pull up the invite that you made for our Twist New Year's Eve party, which is what we're planning right now. We're just planning a party.

There it is. A party with this weekend startups, eight out of ten spots left and a Spotify link to add songs. Perfect. See, look how cute that is. It's so modern. I love it. And I got to upload this little, if you guys saw that, that this weekend startup's

graphic, it lets you upload your own little album cover. I like that. I think it's cute. Go on a Canva uploaded. It's free. It's kind of cute. And it's free. Don't even get me started.

I don't know how they're free. I don't either because every other party platform has started charging and kind of a lot. Like it's sort of, I think I spent like 60 or 70 bucks last year to send a paperless post to like a lot of people with a premium invite, you know. Yeah, it's a little ridiculous. Now I'm like, I'm just using a combination of rando group texts. Right. That's kind of what I was doing. It felt like before, especially for dinners.

Yeah, you leave somebody out or it's like somebody is like not going, but they're still in and they don't want to leave because they don't want to be rude that happened with me recently when I did a cookie decorating thing. And similarly to you, the same week, I did a cookie decorating event on one of the girls couldn't make it, but she didn't want to be rude and leave the chat. And so she was like awkwardly in the chat for a while. And I was like, I'm sorry there. Yeah, yeah, it's tough. Hey, everybody. It's Molly Wood, co-host of this week in Startups and Managed. director here at launch and our mission at launch is to back builders and help build founders.

Founder University is one of the ways that we do that. We've got a 12-week online course to help you build and launch your MVP or idea. It's a hybrid course, meaning there are live presentations, virtually twice a week and asynchronous learning. At the live sessions, those include presentations from industry experts and you'll get a Q&A with these experts. and members of the launch team. Plus, deep dives every week to cover what you're learning. And then asynchronously, we're going to give you homework. A little extra videos and reading each week.

And we'll go step by step with you as you build your MVP. Now, I know you're wondering, how much does this cost? Okay, so we want founders to have skin in the game, but we don't want to take money from our bootstrapped builders. So here's what we do. We charge $500 up front for the founder university 12-week course. But if you attend the live sessions and you launch an MVP, we'll give it back. In other words, this is our ethos in action.

Do the work. And we return the entire $500 at the end and it's free. So do you have an excellent idea for a startup but you don't know where to start? Or are you in the early stages of launching your MVP looking for those first customers? Founder University is a place to guide you through those early stages. Cohort five of our 12-week Founder University will kick off in March, 2023. You can learn more and apply at course. Dot Founder.

Dot University. Hope to see you there. All right. Let's look at so competitors, because this is such an interesting space. Like we get pitched on party planning apps all the time. Like, oh, how to organize your events or show you what to do. And we're always like, it's so crowded.

But they're still out here getting funded. So Posh is a platform that was founded. It looks like around the same time as Partifle. According to Pitchbook, they raised more like $100,000 at a pre- money valuation of $200,000, not that $80 million that Partifle is valued out right now. Let's see, Kickback Collab. Do you know about this one? I've only been to one event from them. And so they're similar to Partifold. I have never had hosted my own event on them. And I've only been to one birthday party. And it was in the beginning of

December. And my only issue is when I got the text from people, I was thinking, why isn't this just on PartiFle. So I think that's probably good for Partifle. Yeah, it is. That's a lot. Right. And I was like looking into it. And I was like, this is weird. Like most, most people in my friend group have like, kind of moved over to Partifle. And I realized it was because the Kickback Collab app was founded by a UPenn grad. And the party that I went to was for a group of UPenn students. And I'm like, you know what? Utilizing your network. So interesting to see maybe in Philly where people live, kickback club is like a lot more popular than Partifle is. I'm not sure. sure. And there's another one, like you said, posh. I've actually, again, I am a partyful stand.

I will only use partyful from here on now. And I've gone to events with posh, but they've all been those like larger scale events and they have not really niched down and tackled those small groups. All right. So Partifle is the winner in terms of planning. Now let's talk about what we're going to do to make sure that our party is super baller, aka the key. to an awesome party hiring a bartender. There's an app for that now, too? There is. Because I just went through this and it was a pain of the butt.

That's actually what made me think about it. So, I guess before we even dive into this, how did you find a bartender for a party? I went on Duck Duck Docko like I always do. And I was like, bartender staffing in Oakland. Okay. And I did this last year. So I found a company last year and I used, you know,

was used them again this year. but their quote had gone up quite a bit. And so I was like, there's got to be something else, like event staffing, this and that. And I ended up, you know,

at some, like you always end up with the thing that does a huge corporate party. And they sent me like a, you know, bill for, or a quote for $2,500 or some crazy thing like that. And I was like,

oh, no, no, I'm in over my head here. Like I just, you know, um, yeah, no,

literally internet for event staffing. It's a Craigslist. It almost feels like. It's like Craigslist. It is janky. It is a boomer. It was a boomer way to find help. I'm not the level where even my friends have people that are acting as bartenders at their parties yet,

but I do have friends that are bartenders at other people's parties. Like that's where I kind of am at the adult totem pole. And they've used JitJat Joe. And they love it. It pays really well. So if you're somebody looking for gig work, I hear great things. And I'm not sure how many cities it's in.

And I do know 100% that it is in New York. However, my friends in Baltimore, I don't think of heard of this. But basically, it's like Uber for things like hospitality, retail, healthcare, education, things like that. Something that's great about them is they have a really extensive vetting process so you actually know who you're getting. So they make sure people have their training certifications. See right here, criminal record. They check that. Preshift health screening.

COVID-19 awareness and hygiene training might be a little bit better than looking on Craigslist. But again, I don't know. I don't have a bartender at my party. But I do know that my friends really like it who are into gig work. And this was founded a while ago. It was founded back in 2015. I didn't start hearing about it a lot, though, until the pandemic happened when a lot of my friends quit their full-time service industry work and then went to gig work.

They've raised $17.94 million to date. And its most recent valuation was $77 million as of 2019. Wow. And I should say it looks like you can hire for like health care. Yeah. And it's sort of like, I mean, it's so fascinating how it's all the same business, but updated, right? Like, this is temp work. This is what, like, you know, we would have called a temp agency.

You know what you have like, or anything I actually did that my first year after college, I was a Kelly girl. There was an agency called Kelly. And it was like Kelly temporary placement. But the vestige of when it was like the 50s was that you would literally go out and be called a Kelly girl. My friends are like Lulu Lemon holiday. workers and I saw this and I was like, oh, Lou Lemon could be taken holiday workers

from places like this. So I would be interested to see if there's like boutiques around like small towns or anything like that. If this was able to go to places that weren't just big cities and see how these were utilized. So you can even do it by like day rather than doing it from like November

to January because that must just be like a hit on your pay roll. Yeah, definitely. This is smart. This is very smart. And also, yes, I would love to have hired a barrenover. I want to be clear that this is a recent unlock for me. This is a level up. The hiring a bartender for your party,

I had never done it before this big party I threw last year, but now I've decided that every year I'm doing a holiday party where I hire a bond. Oh, I love that. That's so cool. You should come out next year. I've never been an SAB. I'll put it on the calendar. I know.

What? Oh my goodness. Okay, well, let's, okay, D to C brands, hot still a little bit. D to C beverages. great for your holiday party and non-alcoholic is the jam. It's a thing. Right?

The sober curious movement, I guess, didn't really go anywhere. I guess that pretty much started again after the pandemic. I feel like late 2020, 2021 blew up, 2022. And we have all these great companies that have stuck around. Obviously, see, maybe not doing great right now. But the beverage industry for them, the people, I think, that have shined bright in 2022 have been kin. he, I believe it's pronounced, and toast. All three, I have tried before in all three.

I like, I think they're pretty good. Diet Coke girl. So if I go to a party and they don't have like something I want to drink that's alcoholic or if I'm just not drinking that day, I go straight for the Diet Coke. But if you want something fun for a party, I think it would be kind of cool to have one of these. Toast is super cute.

Actually, yeah, a friend of mine brought, a VC buddy of mine brought non-alcoholic wine as the like thing to contribute to my... holiday party. Yeah. I mean, it really is like a big trend. And I think it would look super. I mean, I like these because they look a little classier than having like a bunch of cans of Diet Coke on your bar. But everybody does like a Coke or Diet Coke. It's really true. I had a, I did a craft sodas at my birthday party earlier this, earlier this month. My favorite little wine bar, shout out, Cafe Sky in the Lower East Side has super duper cute options for craft sodas for my

friends that don't drink. For my friends that didn't want to drink that night. Definitely something to have at parties now that it is almost 2023. Ken is super cool because the co-founder's Bella Hadid. Gia was on Shark Tank and Nick Jonas's wife, Priya Chobra, absolutely loves it. And Toast, I think would be cool for 2023 as like a champagne alternative. Like even the glass like Brian pulled it up earlier. You saw it was like kind of that yellow color. I'm like this would look good and photo.

And like photos, you know what I mean? I think it would look good. I do. Okay, well. Oh, no, we're not to photos yet. But, okay, so other things for planning our Twist New Year's Eve Party music, I noticed on the part of full invite that you made that you created a Spotify list that people could contribute to. This is the first year I've ever done the collaborative Spotify where like I have a couple

girlfriends who are really good at making playlist and I was just like help because I'm not, you know, and we had a whole, it was a whole conversation about the hour of like chill music and then the gentle transition like to like jazzy and then the dance chunk and then the wind down. and we were placing songs literally like, we got it in the dance junk with Purple Rain. And then that, you know, I was whole. Yeah. But seriously.

I don't know. Does everybody, do all your friends know you can use Spotify like this? I don't know. And I actually got thinking about this. So again, the first party I did this for is my birthday. And it's because I am not confident enough to be the DJ. I am of the small minority that enjoys country music in my area of New York. And that is not going to fly at my birthday party,

I'm listening to a bunch of Kenny Chesney. So I was like, okay. I'm going to make a Spotify playlist. Nobody's going to want to listen to my music. And it went over really great. But like you said, this was the first time you did it. This was the first time.

I did it. I got the idea from Spotify blends, which is another feature. So basically Spotify takes the music that you like and whoever you're blending with, like your friend. And it makes a playlist curated to both of your types of music that overlap. And you can actually do this now. I've seen influencers doing it with fans and celebrities.

And like how interesting of a way to get closer to, like the people you care about. And I'm like, if like these influences are doing it and creating like these playlists and playing it like in the back of their videos and stuff to connect to fans, I feel like that's like music collaboration is a space,

a feature, I guess that's going to blow up a lot more soon. So super come to have that at my party. I like it too. I do think it's not going to be a startup, you know, just to keep this in the feature. In the future.

It's a feature. And unfortunately, it's like the kind of feature that only Spotify is going to be able to pull off because they have the access to the library. Like, it would be really, really tough to do this if you're not. If you're somebody, if you're not somebody who's already negotiated all of these deals. But Spotify is actually doing it.

It's a feature that's a little under the radar, but way easier. Also, I discovered. So I'm, you know, you've always got one friend who appears to not totally understand the assignment. So instead of helping curate the one playlist, she made four and sent them all. And I was like, this does not help me. However, you can take a playlist, click the three dots and move it. the whole thing right into another playlist. So you don't have to individually click each one.

I remember doing that on iTunes. Move them all over. Oh, that is so nice. They've thought of everything at Spotify. Do not be tempted to start a startup that does this, but. Right. Spotify really, like shout out to Spotify, though, because every time I think it could get better and I'm like,

what else can you do? They do it. I think Partifle should add a button to be like one of their buttons now that I'm thinking about it. They should make this automatic. I feel like this is definitely like I shouldn't have to add a links. Partifle can benefit off this. And I actually think something that would be cool is,

I know TikTok's evil and like must be destroyed, but I can see TikTok creating maybe if two people that are like doing like a collab or whatever, like, you know, I can make those joint tweets. Maybe if two people are making a joint video, I'm not sure if that's like a feature you can do yet on TikTok, if they could like merge their music library that they saved on, that they saved over on TikTok. So for example, my friends and I have a running group called,

I think it's called cool or hot girls run slow. We're running a training for a half marathon and all of us are very out of shape. We made a TikTok account to post all of our runs and we share our runs with our friends with it, right? But it would be really cool if we had all of our saved music from our accounts on our regular TikToks and put those right into the running TikTok. So we didn't have to go back each time and find out which song we liked. Love it. Which sound.

Yeah, totally. And you had mentioned actually even when we were chatting before this. that you could imagine there being, like you said, you could imagine there being TikTok challenges for parties. Like I would like to see, I'd like to see Spotify integrate karaoke.

Oh, that would be so cool. Or Partifle, like bring in karaoke. Because I feel like the thing that these party apps often miss is that they like, sure, you can plan the party. And then you can get your photos after. But like, what do you do during the party?

What's that game? Like Partifle should add a premium feature that lets you pay for like games and karaoke and stuff. Yes. Hello. What's that game where you can ask a question? And then the group has to answer on their phones and they get pulled up. Yeah, Jackbox.

Jackbox. Oh, top 10 game. That is a top 10 game. Put that on anything. Anything. That, you're right. That is actually such, Molly, that is a punch up. We need that.

We need that. Partyful needs that. We need that. Partifle. Call me. Perfect. Do it premium features because you're going to need to monetize. But if you start making me like buy coins to send my invites or whatever, that's dumb. Don't nickel and dime me with that crap.

Please don't. monetize with awesome in-party features. Yeah, I like that idea. Partyful is planning your whole party then, hopefully by 2024. Planning your whole party. I love it. All right, well, this is amazing. I think we have planned a perfect party.

Our last tip for you, if you're not using Partifle, it sounds like on Partifil, you can at least upload a lot of your photos, which is amazing. Our last tip for you is that, honestly, the easiest way for you all to share photos, because right now I'm in group text hell. With this, it's just Google Triv. just Google Drive it Don't send the ICloud link

It doesn't work There's a bunch of things That have gotten messed up I feel like with the new iPhone updates One of them is voice to text Mine nobody's I don't know why

It's not working Horrible I don't know what happened But It's ruining my whole life Apple It is ruining my whole life Voice text is pretty bad

And a few updates ago ICloud links Kind of died too Like their Mine are always like pending like so many. My friends have older phones now, especially, and I'm like, this sucks. So, yeah, we're leaving iCloud links back back in 2022, and we're only using Google drives in 2023. All right, Rachel, thank you for the awesome segment. Everybody, have a great party. We're going to be

kicking it at our twist party. You're all virtually invited. Happy New Year. Awesome. Thanks, Molly. All right, that's it for today. Everybody, great show. We'll be back tomorrow to celebrate an amazing year in tech and startup news with our twisty awards for 2022. That's why I'm wearing this fancy dress. You're not going to want to miss it.