This Week in Startups - E1031: Zumper CEO & Co-Founder Anthemos Georgiades makes renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel, shares insights on monetizing marketplaces, diversifying revenue streams to limit downside, Airbnb’s effect on the rental market & more!

Episode Date: February 25, 2020

0:44 Jason shares some thoughts on hard work 1:52 Jason intros Anthemos Georgiades and they discuss how Zumper was launched at TechCrunch 4:02 How did Anthemos wind up as a founder after working in consulting 6:45 What is Zumper's origin story? How many iterations did they go through before coming up with an MVP? 15:34 How did Zumper monetize their marketplace? 18:30 Partnering with Facebook & diversifying revenue 27:12 Anthemos shares thoughts on growth vs. profitability, should Brandless exist? 31:03 Uber vs. Airbnb in terms of EBITDA, thoughts on current state of Airbnb with IPO pending 37:56 Differences between Airbnb and VRBO customers according to Jason 41:00 Airbnb's effect on the rental market 46:15 Thoughts on co-living spaces 48:35 Reactions to Zumper's monthly rent report 51:20 Co-living as a business from a VC perspective 53:02 Jason gives Anthemos some NYC hotel suggestions 54:01 Jason's Hertz car rental story 59:04 Increasing difficulty of building a major team in San Francisco 1:07:38 Jason calls Ben Horowitz & answers a question from a fan

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Visit help scout.com slash twist to learn more. Hey, everybody, welcome to this weekend startups. I'm your host Jason Callicannis and I am on fire right now. Listen, working hard is how you win. There's a bunch of dipshits on the Twitter at this very moment telling you to have balance in your life and that that's what's important if you're running a company. Wrong. If you're, that balance in life is important.

If you're running in a company, it is an Olympic caliber sport. It's going to be really effing hard. And a bunch of rich people who are pulling the ladder up behind you and giving you terrible advice, telling you you need balance in your life, are doing you a huge disservice. I am not going to lie to you. I never have in over a thousand episodes of this podcast, which is why you stop me when I'm in line on the,

ski lift or at Starbucks or wasting $7 that Phil's getting that mojito thing. Freaking delicious. You need to work hard. There's a direct correlation between hard work and success in this world. Look at Draymond Green. $100 million contract drafted in the second round. And he's killing it. And everybody wants him to come to their team because he works hard.

My next guest has been working tirelessly on Zumber. Z-U-M-P-E-R.com. If you're a young person getting an apartment, you know what it is. If you're an old person or wants a home, you probably don't because you're not renting anymore. His name is Anthemos Giordadadis. That's great. How does your mom pronounce it? So Greek for the British accent because of the British mother, Georgiades or Joryadis, which is a little harder.

Joryadis. Yes, that's perfect. Anthemos Joriadis. I'll say Yoradi is kind of, yes. That's right. Yeah, you want to do this. And you founded Zumper back in 2009. 2012, actually.

2012? Oh, sorry, my researcher got it wrong in the notes. I thought it was 2003 because you were at TechCrunch Disrupt, right? You launched it there. That's right. Somehow we came runner up in like the battlefield competition when we really had nothing at the time. It was the one that, your mechanic one, if you remember those. I remember.

I almost invested in your mechanic. I looked at that. I thought, this is a pretty good idea. Having the mechanic come to your driveway is a great. way is a great idea. Do you know what happened to that company? I think it's still going. I think they shifted some of the founders into new roles and they have a new management team.

Still going. Oh, geez, I think seven years in. I think where the two from the class is still alive. If you look at it, if you look at Tesla, they are doing, I think Elon said they can do like 80% of their repairs or whatever in the field. So the last three or four times I've had to have something done, let's say the last four times I had to do something done with my Teslas. I think half of the time was just done in my driveway.

which is a huge unlock when you think about it. And they're doing that in-house, right? They're not contracting that out, or they're doing it like Tesla owns? Tesla does it themselves. Yeah. So I think the idea behind Tesla is eventually going to be, because I think they're doing collision now in the early days, because I had some of the first ones, and I got a couple of dens here and there.

I was like, Elon, how do we get these fix? He's like, yeah, I'm trying to find somebody who will do it for us. Like, here's a body shop, but it's made in a carbon fiber. So a lot of the stuff is hard. And I was like, why don't you just put this stuff on a shelf and I can just go to the Tesla factory take one of the panels and say yeah that's where we're going and that's actually what they're going to do just swap them in or out

so you went to HBO couldn't get into Stanford that's my standard joke and then was this your first company coming out of Harvard Business School? Yes my first company never thought I wanted to be a CEO just as so many of your guests just like had an problem I wanted to solve that sucked in my life

and just that's the path you take and now I'm done now and you were a business consultant where you're Boston or something BCG yeah and it was it was a I know Give me heat. How long did you do that for 18 months? I survived 20, 30 months. 30 months.

Two and a half years. Double what I would expect. Well, you open with work ethic and it's kind of crazy that you spend your 20s working. I mean, I really did work 21 hours a day for two and a half years. When you were at Boston Consulting Group. And you're working. Is there idea to haze people to do that? Because it seems unnecessary to work to that level as his management consultants do.

Why do they do that? Yeah, it's an amazing job. I think these jobs are so client focused that they will do whatever the client needs. And so when you're up at four in the morning, a BCG or Bain or McKinsey, you're not doing the model, you're editing a slide with an appendix and a footnote that no one's going to read. But it's the, they don't say no to the final percent, but that final percent takes the entire evening. So it teaches you a good work ethic, but it also teaches you like, A, how to be 80-20 and B, like, do something you love. Like, you've got to do

something you love if you work 21 hours a day. And to your dream one point with how you opens, like, I think it's easy to work all day long if you just do a job that you feel passionate about where people appreciate you. Yeah. And like sometimes in consulting, not the vibe. Well, yeah. I mean, if you're, if you're Draymond Green and you work really hard or you're working and you're playing basketball and you love the game, you like competing, it's not work.

Yeah. And that's the thing that these people are losing about when they give this stupid FACCA advice that you shouldn't work hard. It's like, well, if you love it, then what am I going to do? Stop doing what I love after eight hours and then say, oh, because somebody who's literally worth $100 million on Twitter told me, I need balance, that's what's important, then I need to stop work at 8 o'clock. Sometimes the best work gets done between the 8th and the 12th hour. Sometimes that's when the magic happens is when you're grinding. Yeah, we were saying this

before we started. Like Zumpur, my favorite time is when we had 12 people, when we used to come to a all-hands meeting. Because there was just no depth. Everyone was uniquely accountable for what we did every week. And when you showed up to a Monday morning meeting and we still do the same all-hands meeting. Every Monday, 1230, we show every number in the business since day one. But back when we had 12 people, every person was uniquely accountable for a piece of the business. We have 200 people now. Love my team. We're a much more like realistic, successful company now. And yet how do you drive accountability when you have 200 people? How can you convince number 201 that she uniquely matters because she does? But it's really easy to just blend in.

On a percentage basis, it's a hard story to get apart because if you're one out of 10, you're 10% of the team. If you're one out of 100, you're 1%. Yep. And it is hard to find that meaning in it. Tell everybody, what the origin story is of Zumpur. Why did you start it? So Zumpur was founded out of pure frustration with apartment renting in my 20s. I grew up in London, moved to New York with ECG, moved to Boston for grad school. I think I moved seven times in my 20s and each time I thought search was okay. You can find, you can use Craigslist or Zillow or whatever to search for apartments. I always found that actually when you found something you wanted, you were jettisoned into email ping pong with a property manager or a landlord or a broker. Why was there no e-commerce

transaction for apartment rentals. Why is there no book button? Like there is an Airbnb in short-term rentals for a long-term lease. And so Zumpur's founding mission was make renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel. And that is what we're squarely focused on. Yeah, I mean, if you just think about what Elon did with Teslas, the ability to just go online and order one and to put $500 and put a deposit, like literally the Ford Motor Company is in year like, how old is it? It's 100 what years old. And they still can't let you go online and order a product. I mean, this is why these companies are effed for all eternity because their whole franchise model is so disgusting and horrific and anti-consumer. But you went, are you able to run this in New York and places like that where it's a completely crooked, corrupt system where brokers, and I think this may have changed in the last couple weeks, but where brokers are basically pitting people against each other and then they tell you you you've got to put two months down.

But then at the last minute, they say three months and they skim the third month and they high pressure tactics. That is exactly the problem we're fixing. When I moved to New York, I could not believe. You're going to spend a third of your income on your rent. In New York, you're probably going to spend more than a third of your income on your rent. The biggest transaction you make every year as a renter, 110 million people in the US rent. They spend a third of their income on their rent. In New York, it's even more.

And they're being, kind of duped at the final step. That is exactly the transparency we want to the brain. So in New York, for example, we work directly with landlords when we do it two ways. We either have, could have full serve or soft serve, self-serve. Some landlords want you to go do the photography and stuff. So we can send people in, we can put a lockbox or actually do a tour ourselves, more than happy to do that. Some landlords just want to self-serve.

They just want to use our software, a bit like how they used to use Airbnb host software to manage their business, collect their rent. Zumpur does that for a landlord. And so we offer landlords the ability to kind of do everything themselves or to get a bit of help to close stuff. But it was all ideally pointed to the renter, where the renter will feel like this is an e-commerce, transaction, not just a random piece of paperwork that goes into a pile. Which city did you just start with and why? Because this is a regional play.

Yep. And each city is uniquely different in terms of their regulation slash corruption slash how the landlords behave. So yeah, so I was in between my two years at HPS. I came to San Francisco where I met my co-founder, Taylor. And we started in San Francisco, which is a really, we'll probably get into this warped real estate city and the dynamics are bizarre. But the fundamental.

You can take the words real estate out of that state. statement too. It's just a warped city. It is, we live in remarkable times in San Francisco. It is, it is changing very quickly. And real estate here is unique, very strange, 60% of stuff rent-controlled. There's some weird ordinances, but the fundamentals are still here. The landlords need vacancies filled, and they're very worried about like renters and their quality. And so in San Francisco, we actually just tested, would renters in 2012 make offers on apartments on an online board, would they just publicly make offers and the landlord could then choose between risk and reward, between kind of how credit worthy they were and what the

price was. And we showed overwhelmingly landlords would do that. And so I think that was the fundamentals of this industry will look more like Airbnb in five years. Was that your MVP? That was the MVP. You just said put it up there and just go ahead and make a bit. Oh man, it was so ugly as well. It was like just green website, like green back pages. For some reason, we had everything green. I don't know why. There's the worst color scheme you could ever think. Oh, it was so bad. Terrible on the web. And you said the UI was... What's green on the web?

Tell me what's a website that's green on the web? So one of our competitors was green was Trulia, but I think they've been done. Trulia is a little green. Yeah, a little green. Yeah, why is that? So purple's untrustworthy. I'm trying to think green. Glass door is green.

They go. Glass door went heavy on green. Yeah, it's terrible. Next door has a little green. Next door has a lot of green. Yeah. I mean, like if you're doing a website about trail running, yeah, go ahead and green. But everything else is blue.

Yeah, we ended up blue and magenta. Of course. Yeah, we are used it. Cool. A really horrible MVP, and I remember at TechCrunch Disrupt, we pitched it. And I remember the editors of TechCrunch just before we're going on stage, we ended up dumbing down what we pitched, because we basically pitched this offer where it was not an auction at all. We did not want to elevate prices. We just wanted everyone to have full transparency that if someone had been to that apartment the night before and made an offer, you knew what it was.

The problem was to the outside, it could be misconstrued as an auction. And I remember, I think it was Alex here at TechCrunch could have nearly vomited on us when we pitched it before we went on our state. because she was like, this is pretty controversial. It was actually very good feedback in retrospect that what we proved was that everyone wanted to be transactional online, but we hadn't quite nailed the mechanism in which people did it. Yeah, whenever you get into an auction or asking people what they think it's going to be, it just slows things down.

And it creates paralysis, doesn't it? Because now you see four different prices and you're like, okay, am I overpaying, underpaying? This is why even Truecar, which I liked, and I'm friends with Scott Painter, I thought it was a brilliant idea in one way, but it also increases your anxiety because you're like, oh, my God, there's different prices for cars. Am I paying the right price? And now you're getting into this optimization as opposed to closing. Yep, that's it. And sometimes with transparency, you can engender the wrong behavior because if you say to a renter, this is not an auction, but you're showing open prices.

Of course they're going to think it's an auction and they're going to bid up. And so we ended up doing something that was the very opposite of what we were trying to achieve, but we learned something from it. So then we scrapped that, literally built a search platform for four years. So the first four years of Zumpur had nothing to do with transactional tools. We built what is now the largest private company in our space. We'll be used by kind of 85 million Americans this year to just search for apartments. And now a subset of our listings are transactional, meaning you can kind of pre-qual and book them. And our job in the next few years is just make a subset of our transactions, the majority of our platform.

I want to understand when you're creating a marketplace like this, how you think about, when we get back from this quick break, when you focus on just building up the liquidity in the market, the number of listings, the number of brokers, the number of renters, you know, because you have this two-sided marketplace, and maybe even three with the brokers. I'm interested in how they play a role in here. And then when you decide to monetize, we get back on this week in startups. Hiring great people is the way to grow your business. You know this. But how do you do that and run your business at the same time. Hiring is a huge time suck.

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LinkedIn.com slash TWIST and get $50 off your first job post. Terms and conditions do apply. Because they're giving you a 50. All right. Let's get back to this amazing episode. Welcome back to this week in startups. I got Anthemost, the CEO and co-founder of Zumpur, Z-U-M-P-E-R.com, when we left our hero. After starting this company in 2012, I was wondering a lot of people would do marketplaces. A lot of people say, hey, listen, you got to have the fees baked in like Uber did or Airbnb. Another group of people say, hey, don't worry about that. Just get to critical mass and then later on turn on the transactions, transaction fees.

and then take your vague, your take rate. How did you do it with Zumper? And what's your philosophy on this? So it was great question. We were strongly the latter. So if you think about apartment rentals, if you don't feel like you see everything as a consumer, you're going to bounce.

Like you're going to spend a third of your income on this transaction. If you go to a website that has 20% of the listings, you're going to look and you're going to know it immediately. And so supply-side liquidity is absolutely king in our industry. Kline did our Series A in 2014. So five years ago, we did our Series A. And we had no traffic. had 30,000 users a month, but we had accumulated basically every single listing in San Francisco

in New York, then we had more listings than anyone else. And we did our series A entirely on that premise, Jason, of supply-side liquidity is king. Don't ever create a barrier to it in the early days. Give it away for free. Build tools for those supply side listing landlords to manage their business on Zumpur, even before Zumpur had a single MAU. And then over time, start to inch into the monetization. So we were strongly the latter, and I really believe that marketplace is to liquidity first, typically. How did you get the information that was on Craigslist, you know, large part onto your platform?

Is it legal to just copy it? Or did they try to stop you? Or did you have people in Manila or India just scraping the web and trying to normalize data and contacting people? How did you get those first 10,000 listings or whatever it was? Yeah, so just as we were launching Craigslist were going after a bunch of competitors in our space, so we didn't touch Craigslist. We had to do it like the hard way.

We knew it even if you crawled Craigslist. which we didn't. We knew that one day you'd have to build bottom up your own business. So we could have cut the middleman and just went to building it bottom up. The biggest hack we had was building landlord tools. So ways for landlords to like create a listing on their phone, syndicated to all the main sites and then bring the leads back and do. What did you call that tool? The Zumper Pro.

Zumper Pro. And it was the single most successful products we built in the first two years, even though no consumers know about it. Yeah. So this is the phrase. I don't know who came up with it, which is come for the tool, stay for the marketplace. That's it. So you heard that at that time. time. I wish I'd heard that. I think we just made it up as we went. We basically just understood that

we needed a reason for landlords to have listings on our platform, even though we had no ME used to show them. And so we used to syndicate to Zillow, to Trulia, to Hotpads, all these platforms that could bring all the demand until the day where we got big enough. And then you're like, deprecated the tool or? A tool exists. We just didn't need to syndicate it out. So right now Zumpur Landlors can get onto Zumpur, padmapper, this company we acquired, and also Facebook Marketplace, where we power a decent chunk of Facebook marketplace is rental vertical. Oh, really? Is that like a specific deal with Facebook that you did?

Yeah, we did. So we were one of their two launch partners, and I think they were looking for like listing liquidity on their rental vertical. And so we pumped a bunch of listings there, and they send the leads straight into our landlords. How does one negotiate with an 800 million pound gorilla? Like Facebook, they just tell you, this is what we want and you say,

yes, sir? Or do you actually come in and say pay us? or do they say you have a chance to do this, pay us? So we had two good ins to them. One was Jim Breyer, who sat on their board for a while. Exactly. And then of Briar Capital, who invested in Zumpur gave us an intro. So we had a good in.

The people we dealt with the Facebook were, I think, very humble. They knew that they had the ridiculously over a bazillion pound gorilla, but that they didn't have listing liquidity. And so actually really was when you dealt with marketplace, like dealing with another startup. And actually, there's no economic arrangement. We send listings. They send leads.

It's kind of like a win-win. Is there some fear that you give them the listings and then they study you like Google has done to many partners? Google studied Yelp. Google went down the road to buy Yelp. Then Google double crossed Yelp and just took their listings. When you go into a business relationship with that, how do you protect against something like that? Because now you've let, you know, this giant company study how you do what you do. Do you have that fear?

or that someday they're going to go, because which is what they did to all their publishing partners. They were like, Bill Pages. Yep. And then they were like, yeah, okay, now you've spent a dollar to get, we did it. We spent a dollar to get Mahalo guitar playing to get followers. So I was like, we'll spend $25,000, $20,000.

It's like, this is incredible. Yeah. Like, 5,000 views per video. This is great. And then they were like, yeah, now you're getting 300 views per video. You have to pay to reach everybody. And I was like, I told Cheryl and some other folks there, I was like, why would anybody do business with your company

if you pull the rug out like this? Do you have a fear like that? with them? How do you protect against that? Yeah, so any marketplace has to be cognizant, whether it's Facebook, Google, or anyone else, it would be delusional to think that in the long term they're not going to be a competitor. I think the best way

is to diversify your income stream. So, for example, Zumpanow makes more money from transactional revenue than from lead gen revenue. And so actually it aligns us pretty well with these marketplaces that we're actually fine for them to make lead gen revenue because over time, we're much more interested in the deep transactional tools that these companies

are never going to build because they're very specific to our marketplace. What are the deep ones? You mean like charging people's rent through the system? Exactly. So Zumpur, for example, you can now find an apartment on Zumpur, pre-qualify using TransUnion, so we'll run your credit criminal and eviction. That qualifies you for apartments. You can leave a deposit, close your lease through Zumpur and then pay rent through our rails directly to your landlord. And so whereas some of these companies might get into the first one, which is, hey, build a search engine and monetize through leads. It's highly unlikely they're going to ever get into the bottom tools because they're very specific to our

And so actually, I think the best advice is actually align yourself with the thousand pound gorilla where it's kind of a win-win, where actually if Facebook or Google win in this space, it might come at the expense of our direct competitors while we're off figuring out the transaction. Because you have such a deep integration. That's the play. And then never- And you take a percentage of the rent or just pay a fee. Yeah. So landlords either pay us for leads, which is the classic marketing of, hey, every lead we send you, we'll charge you $10. But most landlords pay us as a slice of the transaction. So we disintending- What do you charge them for rent? Because rent's a a big number. So rents a big number. So if we do lots of work for them, we might charge them several weeks of rent as a commission. If it's straight software, we'll charge them maybe like one to two percent of their annual rent rolls. So it's still like a good take. And we're creating a $50,000 lease. Yeah. If it's a $4,000 a month apartment, it's $50,000. Taking one percent is still $500. Correct. But $500 to not have to worry about collecting rent is nothing to have it automated and clean. Small price to pay. And imagine what you can add in. So we haven't announced

any of this stuff yet, but think about like Airbnb's success and, you know, I think the biggest thing they ever offered was that insurance products where the first apartment got trashed and the next week they came out very quickly and said, right, we'll guarantee you up to a million bucks that your apartment won't get stressed. That people are like marketing to methads, like, Mark, please trash my apartment. I need to redo it. And I'll bet that they've probably paid that out like five times ever. But what an amazing underpinning of a marketplace with a financial instrument.

There are similar things in long-term apartment rentals you can do like insure the lease, ensure the apartment, ensure that the tenant won't skip. So I think Zump is very interested in underpinning the marketplace with financial tools. And I think you're seeing a lot of marketplaces do similar things. I think that's the big unlock. It's like, okay, transactional fees or whatever,

you know, and get in the lead gen. But then if you're so integrated into the business that a person can run their business through you, that's it. It's so delightful. That's it. We were investors in a company called Cozy. Oh, yeah.

Love those guys. I love those guys. I love Gina. They wound up selling. Gino had a kidney transplant and thank God it's okay. But yeah, it's a crazy story. But they did something similar. They started without the marketplace.

They just did those tools. You ran into them in the market? Love Gina. So Gino is a friend of mine. I would have bet on him all day long if I knew him. They sold a co-staffer, I think it was disclosed. Anyway, they sold co-staffed for $10 million of dollars last year. And that's right.

They built a SaaS tool that I think one day was going to build its own marketplace, but ended up becoming so successful as a SaaS tool that a marketplace picked it up to try and wedge it into the 22 billion dollar company. Yeah. So correct. I think you've seen a lot of companies go after it. I think the real power is if you own the marketplace and you own the tools, I think you have an unfair advantage.

Yeah. At the end of the show, I'll tell you my Airbnb, my Airbnb having a party being thrown in it. I have an Airbnb. How much did you claim on insurance? I'll tell you at the end of the show when we get back. What I want to know about, too, is this trend. of people, when we get back from this quick break, the trend of people living together, young

millennials not buying homeownership going down. I think we're in the low 60s right now or something in that range. It's historically like, historically been right around that number. It peaked at 70% I believe during the financial crisis, which caused the financial crisis. So I want to know when we get back, what is the actual number of who should own in your mind? 70 broke the market 60 might be too little where you think that is and then how young millennials

and people think about owning versus renting and living together as well as this wacky we live and these communal spaces and the impact they're having on the market

when we get back on this week of startups oh my god you gotta find better software you gotta find software that solves this problem but you got a lot of things on your plate just like trying to find a great restaurant would you just walk the streets randomly and pick a restaurant

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supporting this weekend startups. I want you to go there right now. I want you to thank them on Twitter. I want you to support our great partners because they are supporting this podcast over a thousand episodes. We couldn't have done it without them. Captera. C-A-T-R-R-A.com slash twist. C-A-T-R-R-A dot com slash twist. Get those tools that you can use and make more informed decisions. All right. Let's get back to this podcast. All right. The founder of Zumper. He's been around for seven years. Raised a bunch of money. What you raised 50 million so far? 90 so far. 90 so far. Look at you. 200 employees. 200 employees. Raised 90.

revenue break even or close to it? Not yet break even. How do you think about that in the age of Masayoshi son breaking, either breaking or making Silicon Valley in this last If you know your unit economics, soft bank money makes a lot of sense.

If you're ready to roll, if you know your numbers, go for it. If you're not quite sure you've hit product market fare or your classic unit economics, it's, as you know, it's risky to bet that much cash before you know the numbers.

Yeah, I mean, we saw Brandless shutdown this week. I had T and a Sharkey on the podcast. I love that idea. Do you remember that idea? No, I do. I do. I love the concept. There's a company called Public Goods.

Did we have them on the podcast? Public Goods? I can't remember. But that was like the competitor, the small, low-funded competitor. I think they're doing pretty solid. I love this idea. What do you love about the concept of like brandless and public goods and all that stuff? Yeah, I mean, I think that play was that there's this middle ground between like super kind of cheap stuff in like dollar stores and like really high-end brands.

and their point was there's a millennial class that it's kind of contrarian isn't like brand loyal but wants like high quality goods that are reliable. I think I think that segment exists. There was a lot of press about brandless that it doesn't exist. I think it does. It absolutely does. I think it was, I don't know enough about the company.

We loved it in our house. I ordered it three times and it was fantastic because they were like, here's a bunch of candy. Here's a bunch of like goldfish. Here's a bunch of cereal. And they had looked and they said, listen, we're not going to make, we're going to make it for people who care about the ingredients who are kind of whole foods, good eggs kind of customers. Gorman slash care about the ingredients, care about how they're sourced, care about cruelty-free, whatever.

And then you get this box and it's all beautifully packaged. And so when you open your cupboard, everything has no logos on. And it just looks nice and clean and everything's kind of stocked. It's like kind of this Gattaca. I like it on an aesthetic basis of like an aesthetic and not thinking. Like Uniclo, I don't know if you know that brand for. clothes. Like, that's really big with millennials.

There's no logo. You just buy your t-shirts. Totally. Such a great idea. It plays good. You see why Softbank did it. I had a lot of respect. I remember that deal, like, because no one was that familiar with Brandeis when the deal was done.

But the concept's fantastic. Someone on that. And they were going to put 200 in. They did it in two tranches. A hundred million that 100 million. And I guess they blew through the 100. Things weren't going the way they wanted. And then they pulled the second 100.

Yeah. Which there's two sides to every story, or three or four probably. Rashomon. So I think that they probably, yeah, didn't like what they saw. But to your point about union economics, if you're Uber and you know your in economics and you can just tweak them anytime you want, like this idiot press right now, the press is so dumb. I mean, it's unbelievable. Like they're literally, not all of them. Don't at me on Twitter. But it's amazing to me that the press is like, Uber lost 33 cents a ride. They lost 52 cents a ride on 1.7. billion rides. Ask yourself, if you had to pay 40 cents more or 60 cents more, wouldn't you do that? Or would you then go try to hell a cab or take the bus? Of course you're not changing your behavior. Yeah.

And what does Dara do? He's like, yeah, okay, you don't want us to grow at the highest possible rate? Okay, yeah, well, we can change the prices. And we can get out of markets that aren't profitable. We can stop investing in markets. and we can stop the discounts. And what happens? All of a sudden, it's like, oh, we'll be profitable in eight quarters, six quarters, four quarters, three quarters.

And then the stock pops. So ridiculous. There was an interesting comparison you proposed yesterday, I think, between like Airbnb and Uber's like EBITDA and like two years time that's now forecast where like Airbnb, which is such a unique kind of once in a generation company is. Unbelievable. And it would be unbelievable in two years if Uber had better EBITDA margins or unit economics. It's almost like it. Why would it be unbelievable? Just because I think Uber's pay was, you know, low contribution margins, but the volume is insane.

Whereas Airbnb kind of had a bit of both where they had amazing contribution margins and amazing scale. Yeah. But people don't go on vacation every day. They do Uber every day. Yep. So or if you Uber 20 days a month, you're talking about somebody might do, what is the average? I wonder what the, their target segment of Uber's, how many rides they actually do a year? 200.

Per person? Per person. 300. That's easily conceivable, at least like one a working day, easily. Easily. So let's just put it at 250. And then what's the Airbnb average consumer do? Three transactions a year?

So if it was two or three nights each, it's 10 transactions. But do you know why this is happening, that Airbnb's margins going down and Uber's is going up? Do you know why? I can think of a thousand answers. What do you think they're doing in the boardroom at Airbnb right now that would cause that to happen? Well, I think, and because the IPO is coming. I mean, I think, I have my theory. I want to hear yours.

I think with the IPO, they've had to put in a bunch of stuff that maybe slowed some of the spectacular growth. I think if they've gone out, I don't know. I think they'd gone out like earlier when like there were more kind of people going out. I think they could have taken probably some wildest things. They're doing a lot of stuff rightly so on like trust and safety right now on Airbnb. The regulators have come in. It's harder to grow supply.

And I think then in the meantime, booking's gone at them. and booking is now... Oh, so you think it's the headwinds? This is an interesting theory. It is a bit of both. A little bit of head wins. They got to slow down, make it safer. And, yeah, if they get rid of the party house concept,

maybe that's, I think parties at Airbnb's might be 5% of Airbnb's in my mind. I don't know what you think. But I put, having run an Airbnb, I think it's about one out of 20 customers, one out of 15. Actually, that's been my use is like you go on like a reunion or something. Exactly. So now when does a reunion tip over into a party? Yep. So at ours, we're like 10 is the max.

number of guests, we tell it to people three times, and we tell them there's a camera at the front of the house that alerts us every time people show up. If it goes past this number, we're going to send somebody over and the neighbors are going to call the cops, so don't do it. I think what's happening at Airbnb is the headwinds are certainly something, but I don't think it's enough to slow it down. I think what happened was probably growth as they hit the natural audience. They might have started to have the growth rate slow. So then they said, wait a a second, if we go public with the growth, what would you rather do? Have the growth rate be slower. So you were growing at 30% of whatever, 40% of year over year and now you're down to 30.

We'd rather take that hit or the margin hit. And I think a gambler would make the bet that we want to have top line growth to tell people, hey, we can always work on the bottom line. For sure. We're growing share. We're growing share. It's a huge market. And but then Google and Lyft came out and they said, well, this is a road to nowhere. prove to us that this, because all the press is saying this can never be a real business. And this is where I'm so upset of the press because I was part of the tech press. I was an entrepreneur and now I'm an investor. I did all three effing jobs. And I can tell you having done all three, the founder has 100% data. The press has 7% of the data.

And the investors have, what, 75 in the companies? Your investors know 75% on what's going on? 60, 80. Yeah, they should know the salient stuff. They know the important stuff. They don't need to know this small stuff. the company every day so they don't know everything. So you just think about information, arbitrage, or whatever.

The journalists know the least, but they're impacting the market in some ways the most. So these idiots, Professor Galloway or whatever that dipshit, you know, no skin in the game, Galloway has to say, he's out there spouting off that Uber's not a real business. It's like, you're an idiot. I mean, what a moron. 1.7 billion people are using this. And then he was the same idiot who was like, Tess is not a real business until like they sell a million cars. there's a reason why Professor Galloway is a professor and not an entrepreneur anymore because he doesn't know what he's talking about and he's just trying to say outlandish bullshit

to try to get clicks and get more sponsors for his podcast but the journalists don't know what they're talking about anymore it's bonkers you long you long Airbnb because I think oh my god I think they're going to have I think it's going to work I think everything's of course it's going to work it's totally changed the behavior of every in the market with the only exception being like very affluent people who don't care about money and are old. Because I know affluent young people who are like, I can stay at the four seasons. I can stay at the Ritz-Carlton.

I can stay at the Amman Hotel. I prefer an Airbnb because it's the same price, $1,500 a night as the Amman Hotel or $800 a night the same price as the St. Regents or Rich Carlton. But I get a kitchen and a living room and a backyard. And I like it better. Yeah. I mean, this is a fundamental shift. And when these old people die, who are too scared to be in Airbnb because they think they're going to get murdered or there's going to be hidden cameras, when those people die, Airbnb is just going to go through the roof.

Because these people who are the oldsters, you know, they may never get to it. They may never have the courage to try it. They may be set in their ways. They may have mileage points for Bonvoy or whatever it is. I am so on Airbnb. So do I. I have legacy mileage points from Bonvoy as well. How many?

What do you got? What do you got? I have like a minute. Hold on you want. No, you're going to have more than me. You're going to have way more. You can pay a little better here. You have a million what?

No, like maximum a million. And this is from like very old school SPG credit cards. That's what I have. I have all my SPG points. Let's flop it. Let's flop it. Hold on my bonvoy app here.

I'm glad I didn't make a bet here, Jason. I'm going to lose heavily. No, I'm like, I'm checking my bomb. I'm like 800,000. 800,000. Yeah. All right. That's legit.

It's legit. Hold on. What's Jake. Hold on. What does I say? Up top. Tiny font. Holy shit.

Okay, 1.25 mil. Jason's taking us all that after us. There you go. That's right. I'm going. Where you going, Jason? To Santorini for a month. One night in Santorini.

Santorini is expensive these days. What is $40,000 a night? It's ridiculous. I was looking at my wife last summer holiday. I think it's like a thousand bucks for like a semi-good hotel a night now. Really? I'd rather go to Spetsis or something like where the Greeks go. Yeah, yeah.

Have you been to Spetsis? I have not. I'm not the fakest Greek. I grew up in London, have the long Greek name. Listen, I'm 25% Greek. I feel 150% Greek in my heart. I'm seeing these cups. The one thing I'll say about Airbnb also,

I'm curious to hear your take if there's time is, I think the supply shift is going to be really interesting on Airbnb. They were founded by peer-to-peer and like unique people, selling to unique people. The property managers are huge on Airbnb. And the question for me, and again, I'm long Airbnb. I think they're going to be great is those property managers, are they loyal to Airbnb or do they also post on Home Away on VRBO?

Oh, they do both. 100%. And I do both. Majority of the traffic is on Airbnb. Yep. And the Airbnb guests are better. Yep. The VRBO bests have are generally like, we've only had like three or four issues in the history of doing it for like close to a year now, I think, or maybe over six months.

And the issue with the VRBO people is, they call and they're like, I don't know how Apple TV and a Nest work. I kid you not. And I'm literally sending an assistant over there to show them how Nest works or saying, just text us and we'll change the temperature for you remotely. They literally don't know how Apple TV works. They're like, you don't have cable. It's like, nobody has cable. You can put your Netflix in.

You can just authenticate. I don't know my password. It's like, oh my God. So I just think that's the difference. VRBO is like old school, old people don't know how to do anything. And the Airbnb are just like tight. That company is. No, I don't think you can get dislodge

because you know what? Also, their take rate is so. reasonable? Yes, it's not actually as much as you think. It's reasonable. Then they average in the teens? Something like that. I mean, who cares?

Like, if there, I mean, the app store takes 30%. Yeah, yeah, sure. If you're taking anything under 30%, I think you're good. And to route around it, for us, what we try to do is get reviews. So we leave like a little gift basket, and then we send them a text message on the way in with, here are our top five restaurants in the area and links to the, them. And if you need anything, let us know, here's the top places to order from. So we give them almost like a little air of a, a little bit of like a concierge type experience. And then we

always let them come early or stay late. Awesome. No matter, I mean, unless you have a gas, but we're just very like super nice to them. And then we just write them like three times. Hey, didn't see a review. If you could give us a review that's really meaningful to us. And they write these amazing reviews. And then your house just goes crazy. Once you get past like 10 reviews, boom, instant book, instant book. Awesome. But you need to have. the right house or the right apartment because if the, you know, in this Bay Area, it doesn't work in the Bay Area really because the houses are too expensive. So you've got a $3 million house, you know, the carrying cost on that is whatever, 7%

of the house is 200K. It means you've got to be making like 15K to break even a month. That means you're going to be charging $500 a night. It's kind of hard. Yeah, it's real. It's real. I think it's way too hard. I think it's like certain towns, like college towns, visitor towns.

Oh, Scott, you got a Scottsdale Airbnb is like. the way, oh, it's wonderful. You have any? Not personally, but yeah, like reunions. When you go to Scottsdale, because they're quite commoditized, the housing there, and the houses are amazing, and they're made for weekends away. What is it doing to the rental market? Is that one of the reasons why rents have gone up, is that the Airbnb market,

people doing that, is taking inventory out? So it's definitely taking inventory out. And I think they're being very careful with not being seen to do that and not doing it. But they're doing it. They're doing it a little bit. How can they even claim that they're not doing it? So it is happening from long-term apartment rentals for sure, but in the grand scheme of like what's happened to our city,

sitting here in San Francisco with you, you know, we're in Soma. What's happening here is like, I mean, it's zoning. It's such a boring answer, but like, I'll give you an example. Thanks for doxing major. Yeah. Now people know I'm in Soma. You're eight founders in Soma looking for me.

Lock the doors. My wife and I have a place in a dog patch that we rent out, long-term apartment rentals, lovely place near the new Chase Center in the dog patch. Yeah. I want there to be massive development. I don't care what happens to my property value.

It'll be fine. Like, they need to build there. They have capped building in the dog patch, the dog patch at four stories high. It's so dumb. It makes no sense. San Francisco is so dumb. It makes no sense.

When I'm mayor, Mayorjason.com, I am going to tell every developer if you pay 10 years of tax, taxes in advance this year, we will let you grow, grow your building three times bigger than whatever the regulation is now. So four is now 12.

But you got to go get some goddamn financing and you got to pay me 10 years worth of taxes today. Then I'm going to take all that money, put it in escrow, to build better goddamn transportation and finish this FACCA Bart system, which they need to rip out and, start over because they use their own custom-sized trains. We need to use the standard trains from Europe and Japan and build a proper subway. What do you think of my plan? Would I get your vote if I said, we're going high? There's going to be some shadows, some parks, not going to have the same amount of sun. But we're going to get all that tax revenue in advance to build a proper

barred system that goes everywhere. The barriers to going high, the arguments are pretty weak. if you look at what's blocking the thing, it's one of two things. It's local associations who are protecting home values or it's the politics between San Francisco and Sacramento where cities don't want to be dictated to by like the government of California. It is, you know, Mayor Breed said like interesting stuff. I want her to be riot.

Like rent control, if you take that, was so well intended. Like rent control's intention was amazing. It was to protect us as consumers and as renters. And combined with zoning laws and some of the other things going on, it is also led to the state we're in where there's just no new supply on market and no one's moving and we can't build enough supply. I mean, we're building like a quarter of the supply that there are, there is demand. All right. Let's go through the actual rental report when we get back after this last break. And also I didn't get the answer on what you think of these clubs and we live and micro apartments

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investing. Jeff Jordan and Andrewsson. Ben Horowitz was listening to a live streamer. I just texted me, said he wants to call and ask a question, so we'll do that at the end.

What do you think of all this live work? We live ideas. I really thought that this could be something with micro apartments. I got obsessed with it. Microhomes.

I was looking for an investment. We wound up investing in Blockable.com, which builds modular housing and factories, slightly different than micro apartments or these ADUs,

accessibility, dwelling units or whatever. what impact are those going to have in the future on cities and do you think those are a good thing for us to pursue with this housing crisis micro apartments we live clubs yeah great question uh in uh constrained, supply constrained cities like San Francisco, New York, Austin. Yeah, I see it. Like, I, I've helped a couple of investors who've looked at opportunities here and like, there's definitely demands. And there's an arbitrage pay, right? Just like, master leave something, chop it into smaller bits and leased it again to kind of people renting. Yeah. Do I think it will work in the rest of America, which isn't a supply constraint?

Because most US rental markets or real estate markets are kind of one for one. There's, there's no crazy imbalance of demand the supply. We just happen to live in a, crazy imbalanced city. Unclear. Maybe. Millennials are still, to your earlier question, highly footloose, don't even necessarily want to commit to a 12-month lease, less than anything longer. So I'm kind of long on it in the first 10 cities that they've all focused on in the

we lives and the commons. Totally by it. The biggest challenge for them, I think, will be, does this work in Lansing, Michigan? Or does it need to work in, like, smaller cities? Or is there enough supply where you can have your own place? The reason I think is interesting is if you think about. about low-cost value products like Lyft Line or Uber Pool and just saving money and being frugal in order to have for the millennials and these Gen Zs who really value lifestyle.

Part of having this epic lifestyle is not having a big burn rate. Yep. So in a place like San Francisco, micro apartments or Manhattan, New York or Hong Kong, a micro apartment, which I think is 150 square feet to 250 square feet. Yeah, 350, I think was the limit in New York that you weren't allowed to build less than that because they didn't want families living in under 350 square feet. But they didn't realize that there would be single people all over the place. So the reason to have that here would be somebody could pay $2,000 instead of, what is the average rent in San Francisco now? $3,700 for one bad.

Now, is that number legit or does that include like these $5,000 high-end apartments that skew it? So Zumpur has pretty much every listing in San Francisco. To be clear, these are vacant listings being advertised on Zumpur right now. So this is not saying your neighbor who's been in their apartment for seven years is paying $3,700. The last report, yeah, it came down a little. To 3520. New York is 3,000, Boston, $2,500, San Jose, $2,400, Los Angeles 22, Los Angeles seems high to me, and San Diego, 1750 for a one bedroom.

Yeah, San Francisco has been above New York for several years. It's actually narrowing a little, but there's no signs that anything's going to flop. The difference here is in New York, that's New York, New York. Five boroughs. Five boroughs. Yep. Now, here's the thing. If you live in New York and you live out in Flatbush or Crown Heights, that number is not

3,000. Correct. $1,500? Yeah, this is very bimodal. This is a very bimodal average. You've got a bunch of people in Manhattan paying $5.5K and a bunch of people in Queens paying $2K. Right.

And they can each use the same. city equally because of transportation transportation and that's what's missing here is I lived on the last stop Bay Ridge Brooklyn yep but I could go to Manhattan it just took me 20 or 30 more minutes but same train yep that the people on the other side took yeah so I had to suffer like an extra 30 minutes boo-hoo for me as a young person I can care still part of it once I got to the limelight once I got to the Palladium, once I got to Manhattan, the rocks, see, the tunnel, all these great clubs back in the day. It didn't matter to me if it took me 20 more minutes there.

I was in the club. Like, it was lit. Yeah. You didn't remember on the way back. Fuck, I care if it took me 20 extra minutes on the subway. And you know what? I took the subway home at 4 in the morning, 5 in the morning. We would go to Floran and get a steak frets.

It's safe as well. I lived in New York as well. It's fine. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's long as you're not dumb. I mean, if it's after midnight, go to the middle car where the conductor is. Yep.

Well, the first car where the conductor is. That's all if you're alone. Now, if you had micro apartments, what would they be in each of these top cities, you'd think, as a percentage of cost? What do you think they would actually cost to do? Because the average apartment is five, six, seven hundred square feet? Yeah, 800. Yeah, 100. Yeah, 800.

Yeah. So you could probably get that down. You could probably have two micro. Is that right? Two for one, you think? Yeah, roughly. I think, I mean, there are people in San Francisco to use us as an example against the 35, 20, your pay. if you take a one bedroom, there are people in co-living spaces paying just over a thousand bucks.

What? Yeah. So that goes back to my other question I wanted to talk to you about. Explain what's happening in co-living, legally illegally. What have you seen? Don't rat anybody out. No, yeah, yeah, sure. I think the jury's out.

I've seen, I think the two trends I've seen, and some of these people are used on put to generate demand for co-living. I think we see large consumer demand. If I was a VC, I'd probably, and I haven't seen any of their decks, I think I've seen unproven economics, long-term liabilities. What if that mean, long-time liabilities? I mean, landlords aren't like willingly just like giving up their spaces for this kind of risky thing. There's a bit of CAP-X.

You've got a whole bunch of kids moving in. So a lot of these companies, I think we live was doing this very early, are taking master leases on like buildings. So you're taking like tens of millions of dollars per building sometimes of liability on your balance sheet because you're promising them like 10-year leases. I don't know if that's like how I'd sleep well at night. Now, it's a great business model for some. I don't think it's a great business model.

Because even if you had like a six bedroom mansion in the suburbs and you're renting it for 12K and you fit six people in it, it's 2,000 a person. You're living in a mansion. You get a backyard in a pools. That's kind of cool. Yep. But there's no profit there.

Yep. So I don't think it's profitable as a business in and of itself. But maybe micro apartments at scale if you were building or renovating buildings, that could work. That could work. And I think that's the key point is you kind of got to design it for like exactly the community you want to build. But look at hotels. When I stay in Manhattan now to go to our new, Zumpas New York office, I stand in like a hotel I think called the Arlo where basically the,

yes. The rooms are tiny. You can touch the wall. I don't care. I don't care. From your bed. Exactly. And it's not even that cheap, sadly, but it's like cheaper than like the ridiculous. It's 300 or 400 instead of 800. Correct. I got the tip for you. The one in Tribeca, right? Yeah. I, I, when I was, you know, on a budget, I was doing that. But you can afford to stay at the Ace Hotel. pretty easy and those are bigger rooms funky and then I like the Beekman Have you stayed at Beekman? I'm stayed at the A's and never stayed at the Beek Room. You're ready for the Beekman. You're on the series CD

You can go Beekman. Beekman's going to be like 600 a night The rooms are gigantic. Great restaurants downstairs, great lobby. You treat yourself. It's an extra 300, two or 300 a night for you. You go in for five nights. You spend the extra 1500. You feel like a million bucks walking out of the place. You got to have that swagger. You can't be staying in a room. Like when you're grinding it, yes. But you're going to to big meetings now. Yep.

I'm going to a big meeting. I'm taking Uber Black. You're taking Uber Black. If I'm going to a port meeting, I got to show up at an Uber Black gets me in the right mindset. Cool. You know what I'm saying?

What did you take to this meeting, Jason? What did you take? I self drove my Model 3. I took my UberX. It was good. You UberX did. I UberX most times. I UberX when I was at Park City.

Yep. I had the craziest experience. For some reason, I thought Park City would be better to have an SUV and a four-wheel drive one because I was in Park City and I was like, you know, I've been there when it gets snowed out. You can't, it's hard to get taxis and all stuff, but I know Uber's there, but and they probably have snow tires, but I just want to have my own car in case I have to zip

around to different mountains or whatever. I was there for a couple days. I get to the Hertz counter and the guy is like, oh, you have SUV. I was like, yeah, I got SUV. He's like, which one do you want this one? And I got a Wrangler is really great. I was like, yeah, I never drove a Wrangler. Yeah, I'll take the Wrangler.

Then he's like going through my bill. And he goes, okay, Wrangler, okay, yeah. And then there's like a $100 up charge for the Wrangler. I said, wait, wait, well, hold on. Five minutes ago, you said, pick which one you want. I picked that one. You told me I had an SUV. I picked an SUV.

He's like, yeah. I was like, but you're charging me $100 extra? So my $275 bills now $400? He's like, well, yeah, that's how we're trained to do it. I was like, give me the manager. And I was like, oh, my God, I'm that guy asking for the manager. And I said, I just want to be clear. And I don't mean to get you in trouble.

But is, in fact, the policy to not tell people about the upcharge until five minutes later? He goes, yes, that's our policy. I was like, do you realize how? dishonest that policy is. Somebody clip this and at mention to the Hertz CEO and Hertz support, you guys are hated for a goddamn reason because of these stupid shenanigans like fill up the gas. Are you to fill up the gas or are we going to charge you $8 a gallon? This is why you're hated.

And this price gouging stupidity of upselling me, but not telling me it's an upsell and bait and switching me and then charge any and they really went by the hundred real fast. He's like, okay, so this is insurance, this is they should decline this and the $100 with upgrade and the gas. And I was like, whoa, hold, hold on, hold on. 20, 20, still happening. Still happening. Hertz is still a horrible company that needs to burn to the ground. And so I said to the guy, I said, on principle, I said, $100 does not matter to me.

And I actually really want to drive a Wrangler. So I'm thinking about getting one. I said, on principle, I'm ordering an Uber right now. And I'm going to rip up my restoration. He goes, I understand. He goes, we get this a lot. I was like, okay. So if you work at Hurts and.

Hurtz. Somebody please clip this, a fan of the show, and just troll hurts with this clip. Your company is going to die because of these shenanigans. It's just horrible behavior on these parts. Why isn't it a zip car? I know what happened to them, but what happened to just the dream of, I think that we were promised, get to an airport, walk three minutes, open a zip car, bounce. I did it. I did it. I did a silver car one time. Oh, that's right. Silver car was great. It's still going? It's still going. And I did it one time in L.A. because I was like, I wanted to try an Audi. I'd never driven an Audi either. I like trying. I like cars. Yeah, sure.

And I was like, you know what? I'm going to be here for like a week and I'm going to be driving everywhere. I was going back and forth to Malibu, in fact. And I was like, it's just a pain in the neck to, I get car sick in Uber's. I get car sick in the backseat or even the front seat. If I'm driving, I don't. I like to drive. So I was like, let me get an Audi convertible, see what that's about.

And I tried a silver car. They're off the airport. Yep. You get there. Your car sitting there. And they're good cars, right. They're beautiful Audi's brand new. You don't have to talk to anybody, which is the key.

and you know what you're paying, which is a key. Silver car needs to destroy Hertz. And it would be, the only thing better would be is if they just charge you $50 extra to come pick you up like an Uber. Yep. And I would have, that was what I would have done. I would have been like, instead of $100 a day, because I think they just charge $120 a day or $100 straight.

Insurance is all in it. Gas is all in it. How are we not there? That should be commonplace. I agree. It's just like the abuse of the customer. The only companies that abuse customers are old ones. We have hired CEOs who aren't the founders who are scared of losing their job.

So they do, they maximize profits instead of maximizing joy and being leaders. Because if you're a hired CEO, you're on a contract. And the contract lasts X years. You don't have founder authority. So you think that these little micro apartments are going to become a thing? What's the worst thing you've seen with these people living in group settings legally or whatever? Oh, yeah. I mean, I think there's people, I think there were a couple of press articles about like just gigantic.

social issues because at the end of the day you're putting a bunch of and then take san franciscoe you're putting a bunch of often very well educated franguous people in a house together and it's kind of a rest i think there's been a couple of like huge divides and like packs of you know cliques going around them i've had a couple of incidental so it's not what you might expect from putting a bunch of millennials together but i think and then who's on the lease does one person take the responsibility for the lease and then they live for free by sub-living people i think the startups on the lease the startups are on the lease and then they're kind of subletting their lease or subdividing their lease. But they're not even telling the landlord, I bet. I don't know. I don't know,

but it's... There's a play. It's a hard execution, but someone's going to, someone will figure it out and build a really valuable business. I don't know, to your point, if it's the Kappex side, or it's the operational side, or you need to do both. And in We live, I just haven't, I mean, who knows what's happening. I haven't heard anything about it in the most recent months. And hard to know if that's going to be of any focus as they try and put it back. Let's get back to San Francisco specifically as we wrap up here. But what is San Francisco's destiny at this point? Because it does seem like it backed off.

Remote work now is letting people stay home. So a lot of people are downsizing their office space because it got too expensive. They're letting people work from home. The super commuting phenomenon is there. But I think people are starting to work three or four days in the office or two, three, four days in the office, two, three, four days at home. is it and that's an adaptation to how bad it is is there any solution for this city to do what like Houston or Seattle did where they added a large number of units do you think or is it just too broke to fix so yes I'll give you a kind of answer am I right about Seattle and Houston figured

it out they added a ton of units correct and they've been very quick to do it as well how did they do it do you know I think that zoning has been a it's just not an issue in the way it's a micro issue here because here you have to get like micro support for zoning changes. And there's no reason to do that. Texas is more like broad brush. And if we're going to do it, we're going to do it. We're going to take a macro approach.

You're like everyone will benefit. I understand. I'm a British immigrant to San Francisco. I love the city and I'm like long on it. My core team in Zumpur will always be in San Francisco. There is, it's impossible to imagine we're going to build our company in San Francisco. The core team will always be here. We already have far more people.

The core team, I think, will be here for this one. I think we'll finish the job for Zumpur in San Francisco. Our Scottsdale office will have more people than our San Francisco office, probably by the end of this year. Of course. And we have a great office in Rhode Island. We have a great office in Chicago, in New York. We have remote folks on the sales team. I never used to say that I loved hunkering down, having the team together.

It's implausible to think our next hundred hires are going to come in the Bay Area. It's not just the cost. It's not just the fact that the big Googles and Facebook is going to hoover up all the office space. It's also the talent. Like, there is real talent. outside San Francisco, but all of us here are so cocky and think that just because we moved to Silicon Valley, all of us included that, oh, this is where all the brains are. Oh, my goodness, go talk to someone in Scottsdale or Rhode Island who hasn't had the opportunity to work in a Silicon Valley startup and now

does. They're so smart and they care so much. They're getting the best of both worlds. They're getting the equity in a company that's high growth in a place where trillion dollar, $100 billion companies are made. There's no trillion dollar companies, $100 billion companies, with the exception of Microsoft and Amazon, two very notable exceptions outside of this area. So it's very hard to do. But I think people are starting to realize, wait a second, what is the point of making $150,000 a year being an engineer if I have to pay $80,000 in rent or I can't ever buy a home? Whereas if I made $125 living in Nashville or Rhode Island, I mean, in Rhode Island getting paid a Silicon Valley City salary to live in Rhode Island, you're going to be like the mayor. I'd be like the engineering officers in Providence, Rhode Island. Brilliant.

How awesome is that? Delightful place to live. It's amazing. The quality of life is amazing. You're telling me you haven't thought about with the crime, homeless issue slash addiction issue. Because I think framing it as a homeless or poverty issue is maybe not accurate because according to the report I read and some people won't say this publicly, but a number of people who are very high up said to me, Jason, I'll just leave it at that. this actually isn't a homeless or a poverty issue. It's an addiction and a mental health crisis, not a poverty issue, but people are looking

at it as a poverty issue because it has in the past been a poverty issue. People were homeless because they didn't have the money for a home. Now people are homeless. Ostensibly, they don't have money for home, but if 70% of them are addicted to drugs or suffering for mental illness, which is what the report said in San Francisco, well, maybe if they could solve the addiction or the mental health, they actually wouldn't be homeless because it's not poverty, that's the problem. It's the mental illness that's the problem,

and the self-medicating, that's a problem. So we're framing it as homeless. You yourself haven't thought, do I even want to be in this high-tax state anymore? You haven't considered Austin, Miami, Nevada, beyond Lake Tahoe and not paying state tax and not dealing with this. You didn't think about pulling the rip cord? So it's a good question.

So no, like I have a two-year-old kid, my wife's hair, and I love the city. And I think, like, you and I and your listeners and so many people being here and helping. solve the problem and trying to get the right people elected and donating to solve the problem, I think it's good because if a bunch of the brainpower left and left the problem behind, I think that doesn't solve. You know, we're not going to help anyone.

There's some cool charities here, like miracle messages. I don't know if you ever come across Kevin. They do some amazing stuff using videos to reunite homeless people with their families in like different states. What is that called? Called miracle messages. Check it out. It's amazing. That's awesome.

There's some really modern approaches. So wait, wait. They make a video of the homeless person. They find the people who are in their original. Circle who might be able to support them and say here's a video of your friend Jason who hit hard times and then that might inspire them to intervene. That's it. Bring them home. My wife and I donated to it and we miracle messages. This is brilliant. And we donate Zumpa's time every quarter to literally going on to Market Street and it's done with class because I think sometimes you know

the idea of a videographer from a tech background going out. It's easy to be cynical about it. And like that could be a disaster but they do this with grace. It's only. opted in and so they basically find people who say came from Michigan originally who are now living on the streets for whatever reason and then they have a team of volunteers including zumpur members who i'm so proud of who will then go onto that lancing michigan like uh facebook page post the video and find someone uh who's related now sometimes it doesn't work sometimes there's no it only has to work one out of ten times to me make it worthwhile correct and i think the video takes five hundred dollars to make that's it i think they just crossed 200 reunions and it is an amazing

things. So I think did they videotape the reunion? They do. Oh, you've got to check it out. Miracle messages. It's actually tear-jurking. It's amazing. That, that to me, you know what video gets me? When the soldier comes home? Yep. And they come home early. Yep. And then they show up with their kids soccer game. No, it's insane. You ever see those? Or they're at the airport? It's insane. As a Brit, who's not used to to these, it's, I cry every time. It gets you every time. Oh, you're a Brit. You have

no emotion. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, I know. I work with Sir Charles. Trust me. I know about it. Very deep down. Very deep. Very deep. Stiff upper lip. Stiff upper lift. That's the way to do it. Charles, I mean, I haven't seen the guy cry yet. So basically, I love San Francisco. I think we should solve the issues from here.

For my next startup, would I do it in San Francisco or elsewhere? I don't know. Coin toss. 50-50 you would. You might think L.A. right? LA's so dope. The tech scene in L.A. has...

I like being the underdog. I wish I was in L.A. There's an underdog vibe in L.A. Where you go there and people hear you work in tech and they think you're an idiot. They're like, why would you work in tech? I spent 10 years there. I loved it. It's a, it's a, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a bunch of hungry,

it's there, it's there. I'm, I'm excited about what was going on. I mean, I might pull the rip core at some point and go back. If I had the TV show right now, yep, I would have done it. I had a TV pilot with NBC didn't get on air. Thank God, because the producer was Harvey Weinstein. Oh, wow. Yeah, it was a bit of a problem.

Thank God. I mean, can you imagine, like, and you want to know the terrible for me. And, um, this is the stupidest, craziest thing. When we did it, my attorneys were like negotiating. I had the same attorney as Mark Cuban introduced me to who does his shark tank negotiations. We're doing my negotiations with the Weinstein company. I never told the story. And they fought to give me a credit for my title card.

And then one of my title cards was Harvey Weinstein, Jason Calacanis, executive producer or co-creators or whatever. on the same card. And they're like, Harvey doesn't share a card and blah, blah, blah, but this is a big deal. He's going to share the card with the U.S.

co-grate. And I said, oh my God, his thing back to us talking to my wife. I was like, can you imagine like the show's on the air? Because he did Project Runway too. Oh, yeah. And I think they took his name off the title cards.

But I would live in L.A. If I had the show going, half time, maybe. And they'd be up here half time. There's good stuff. I mean, you see it in your incubators. There's great stuff coming out of L.A. Yeah.

I mean, the ringer just sold for, I think 250 and he lives in Manhattan Beach. I mean, he's pretty public about that. I'm not doxing him. Do we miss anything? I don't think we missed anything. Miracle messages. I love that.

Check out miracle messages. It is. I got to get behind that. Hey, producer Nick and Sir Charles, can we just take a memo here? Figure out this is as legit as Anthemosa saying here. And let's get that person on the pod when we do our, you know, that secret project, next thing we're doing.

All right. Hey, quick call from Ben Horowitz. We got him on the line. can we just yeah dial them up i got i gave you a text of you his uh personal number just dial up ben harwood's holding he's got something to say he had a question for you anthemos hold on hello you've reached the offices again ben i just text ben ben it's jason i'll see you at the warriors game tomorrow night but i got your guy on the pod you said to call you back all right you know what we'll have bet on next time we ran out of time uh all right well you'll see a question though if you want to

oh he did send the oh is a question on the text what's the question read it out to me oh here we go Dear Jason, go to New York soon as the former king of New York. Thank you. What hotel dining recommendations do you have? Love the show. Thanks, Ben Horowitz. I think for Ben, uh, yeah, I mean, he's hip.

He's, uh, yeah, you know, I'm going to go with the Beekman as a hotel. I think it's pretty cool to be downtown. Uh, you might want to try some of the hotels, Gansford, whatever, in the, um, in the me packing. And then, uh, in terms of, um, food, go to Decoy, which is a Peking Duck place in the West Village. And I'll hook you up with the owner.

All right, Ben, I'll see you at the Warriors game in the owner's box. All right. Thanks for coming on the pot. Sorry, Ben couldn't get through. We tried to get through to him. And we'll see you all next time. If you're looking to rent Zumper, Z-U-M-P-E-R, and if you're looking for a job, Providence, work from home, sales, developers, everything.

Hiring for everything. On fire. If you go public, what year would it be? Three years time. Three years time. All right. Maybe I've got to get in on that. Maybe Jake, I've got to get a little slice.

All right, we'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.