This Week in Startups - E1036: #AskJason Special! When to join a startup to maximize equity & job security, types of companies that will thrive in an economic downturn, legendary founder & investor traits, tips for starting a podcast & more!

Episode Date: March 13, 2020

0:01 Jason intros today's topics 2:15 George calls in and asks Jason about social media interference in the 2020 election 11:13 Joey calls in and asks Jason for some tips on starting and growing a podcast 21:05 Dan asks Jason about which health-tech startup idea to pursue 26:49 Alex calls in and asks Jason about the types companies that will thrive in an economic downturn 34:35 Karen asks Jason about legendary founder & investor traits 44:11 Blaze calls in and asks Jason about when to join a startup to maximize equity & job security 52:14 Patrick asks Jason how to get on his radar in terms of getting an internship/job at LAUNCH 55:33 James asks how a young early-stage firm can differentiate itself from the pack and attract talented founders

We've got an amazing ask Jason for you, including questions from superfans, founders, investors. One question, very interesting. What companies and startups will come out of this economic downturn caused by the coronavirus? Also, when's the right time for an employee to join a startup to have their stock options be worth something? I've got some incredible insights on this based on watching people who've made millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars by getting into the stock options. the rocket ship at the right time. We also have tips for starting a podcast since everybody in the future will have a podcast for 15 episodes. Finally, we have a great question about what are the founder traits and investor traits that equal success in my mind from what I've seen? And you're going to be

surprised by one of the answers there. And we also talk about something that's been on people's mind and we probably talk to death, which is how do we deal with foreign interference on social media before this next 2020 election. It's a great collection of questions. We got some people who called in live, got some people who emailed in. We're always taking your questions. Just email, askjasonatlaunch.co. Stick with us. It's going to be a great episode. This week in startups is brought to you by Tax File. The best way to do your taxes is by not doing them at all. Tax File connects individuals and businesses with trusted CPAs that file for you. All you have to do is sign up. Visit taxfile.com slash twist to get 15% off your tax return today. That's t-a-x-f-y-l-e.com

slash twist. Monday.com. Manage all your core business activities in one place. Start your 14-day free trial by going to Monday.com slash twist. And front. Transform your corporate email into a multiplayer game so your team can increase customer experience and take action faster. Take 20% off your first year today by using the code Twist at sign up and visit front app.com slash twist for more information. That's F-R-O-N-T app.com slash twist. All right. Next on the line, I have George calling from the 562.

What area code is that? Well, that is Los Alamitos, California. but I'm actually calling from the basement of a school at USC. Oh, wow. In the USC incubator. Very cool. Is the campus shut down because of the coronavirus? Yes, it is, actually.

Wow. We're supposed to have the start of career fair today. And it's, I think we're all going to get a lesson in how to effectively use online tools and work remote. We're having the same issue with our accelerator. We're going to do a couple weeks remote it looks like. So you have a question for me. What is it?

All right, well, my question is, what are your thoughts with regards to combating foreign interference on social media prior to the 2020 election? Yeah, it's a great question, George. And obviously, you have two different approaches between Twitter and Facebook. In one case, Twitter said, we're not going to do political advertising during this election. We're going to take it off while we figure this out. Democracy is too important. And then on the other side, you had Zuckerberg saying, obviously, we're going to take it. the money and we're not going to police it. And if you want to put up fake ads with fake information

on it, we don't care. It's not our job. You place ads. The public's got to figure it out. And Facebook's only concession was we're going to make a page where you can see who pays for political ads. I think what should happen is all advertising on the internet should require somebody to put in their driver's license or put in their passport. This way, somebody specific has their name tied to the ads. and then like a doctor writing a prescription, we force doctors to put their name on a prescription because we want to have that trail of breadcrumbs. So if somebody was writing a bunch of oxy-cott or percocet prescriptions and giving them out willy-nilly, you could go back to the person,

say, hey, you're going to lose your license. So for advertising, since it's had such a profound impact on our democracy, why not have the same approach to gun licensing or licensing people who are in taxis or licensing people who cut hair, all of these things we have licenses for in the United States. But for advertising, we allow people to do whatever they want, essentially anonymously with burner credit cards. And to add friction to those would mean these companies would lose a little bit of money and they might lose on the margin some of the smaller advertisers. But I think that democracy is too important. We should tie the advertising to an individual who works at a company, not just the tax idea of the company, but

also the social security number of that individual who placed that ad so that if the ad was, let's say, a racist ad, the person who's placing the end might say, you know what, boss, I don't think I want to place this ad with my name on it. I don't want to be responsible for putting up this Hillary Clinton ad. The other thing you could do is not take roubles from people and allow people to put ads up who are Russian in our election this year. And if you look at what happened the last time around, people were not even reviewing the ads. And if you put an ad up for a dating site on Facebook, they will not let you put it up. If you put too much text on the ad, they will not let you put it up. So they are reviewing the ads. They're just turning a blind eye. Now, on the counter to

that argument, we allow people to advertise in magazines, newspapers, and on television and radio. So why shouldn't online be able to get a piece of that action? And if this is where people are, why can't you advertise to them? And then maybe it's a generational thing. Young people can't get hit with advertising from political candidates who have a better message. And if you look at Bloomberg, he was starting from far behind Trump on Twitter. And he wasn't allowed to spend money on Twitter to promote his presidency. Maybe if he was able to spend on Twitter, he could have caught up to Trump or maybe put up a better fight.

So it's beyond a complex issue. But I think overall, we should just have some ownership of the advertising and somebody's name should be on the ad so that when things are put up that are defamatory, racist, insane, somebody has some skin in the game. That's my best estimate. And, you know, sometimes you also don't want to overreact. We've got this perhaps once in a lifetime or once in the lifetime of this country, black swan event of Trump being elected.

You know, we might be just learning a big lesson. be a one-term president, and we never do this again. And we might all become to the realization that, yeah, the Russians are interfering. And if you see political advertising and you see weird ads and you see weird memes, you kind of anoculate yourself to it and say, yeah, you know, let's look at the track record of the individual holistically and maybe on the margins ignore things about PizzaGate and people in the basement of pizzerias like they did to Hillary Clinton. Great question, George. And good luck with your accelerator. I assume you have a startup, George?

Yes, Jason. I run overlooked. Our mission is to build the social news network that ends fake news. We built the safest place to share articles at their friends. Great. And we sell technology

to help organizations disseminate information. Fantastic. Well, good luck with it. And thanks for calling in. Can I have one quick follow-up question? Yeah. do you not think that the beauty okay so the beauty of facebook and twitter is that they have the ability to post their own content but that's also an architectural achilles heel because with billions of users

billions of bots it's resulting in trillions of pieces of content which is overwhelming their content moderators to go over what we said is we need to limit the data drastically so that our journalists in the future can moderate that content. Do you see that as a concern, the ability to post, especially with Russian bots? Listen, it's obvious that Twitter has not got a handle on the creation of new accounts, and really this is an economic issue. They want to show growth. The stock market looks at the number of users, the number of accounts created. So there is no incentive for them to not have new accounts created. If they have, if they throttle and make it more difficult to create new accounts. Then when they report their numbers, people are looking at those numbers as an

indicator of how they're doing. And so there's a financial problem there. And of course, everybody should be able to publish two different platforms online. So you don't want to limit people's ability to express themselves. With bots, it becomes pretty obvious when these bot farms get going and how to throttle them. Like if you see a bunch of bots being created by the same IP addresses or the same IP range or just a velocity of random accounts being created. So, um, I think they'll be able to handle it. And the other possibility is to just allow people to pay for these services. And I think a new service will emerge in the next decade, in the 2020s, where people will pay

to be on a social network and you'll have to have your real name and you'll have to have a credit card on file, just like on iTunes, basically, you have to. And this will create a different type of ecosystem. So I'm always very much encouraging founders to start new social networks that are paid, not advertising based and that maybe lean towards a better arc of history. Okay, great job, George. Tax season is almost here. And if you are a small business owner or if you work for yourself, self-employed,

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All right. Next on the line is Joey. Joey, where you call them from? Austin, Texas. Austin, Texas. Great place. Are you a Franklin's or a La-Barbique? La-Bourke all the way.

Me too. 100-L-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-K. Okay, what's your question? So I just started a new podcast in Austin. is called Moon Tower Business. We have one recording so far. Basically, spotlighting entrepreneurs, startup companies and business leaders in the city,

focusing just in Austin because there's so much going on here. And this is the first time I do a podcast, and I just kind of wanted to get some feedback or some kind of tips on getting it going or growing it. Right. Okay, so podcasting has gotten very popular, and there's a recent podcasting has gotten popular. it's because the press is so bad today, and I don't mean to say like fake news in the Trump way.

I think a lot of press try very hard, but they're under-resourced. And the subjects, especially the important ones, are not participating in the way they once did because they don't feel they're getting treated properly by the press. They feel like they're getting misquoted. They feel like they're not getting their story out. But then you look at podcasting, you have 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes to get your story out as a subject, as a guest. What's happening is all the great guests are saying, I should not only stop talking to the press or stop doing short, quick hits on network TV.

I should start doing long form podcasts. So we got an influx over the last five years of people saying, hey, I want to tell my story on this week in startups because you're going to take the time to tell her properly. And then we started to see the next level, which is the people who are great guests are starting their own podcast. So I saw Sian Bannister, the angel investor who's been on this podcast, a whole bunch, has started her own podcast. And so you'll keep seeing that trend where the subjects say, enough, I'm going to start my own podcast. In fact, Chimov Polly Hopatia, who's been on our podcast a lot, who does a lot of hits on CNBC, he's going to, we're starting a podcast together.

So we're going to do like a season of the all-in podcast. Now, for you, how to do a great podcast. Number one, you need great microphones. I cannot stress this enough. You need to have perfect audio. This means you have to be an adult. and have a quiet room. You need to have proper microphones. The sure microphone is the one most people use, but there's plenty of different microphones out there. Use a great microphone,

have a great audio engineer, or bring the file after you record it to a great audio engineer. It has to be perfect audio. When you turn on a podcast in today's day and age, if it is staticy or clicking or low and the levels are not right, people have other choices, so they're going to leave. So great microphones, number one. Number two, great guests. You want to have great guests. If you can find a great guest and you got to travel to them and do it in their conference room where you got to fly to their city, it's worth it.

Get the great guest. Guests equal ratings and they're going to share it. And, you know, our show, the speaking star artist has been defined by some outlier guests who really got us a lot of attention. And then consistency. If you think you can do it weekly, do it weekly. If you think you can do it twice a week, do it twice a week. If you think you can do it every other week, do it 26 times a year.

You'll get good at it somewhere between episode 100 and 200. And your interview skills are important and the ability to cut somebody off if they're boring, but in an elegant fashion. And asking short questions. You got to ask short, tight questions. If somebody says something on the podcast as well that you don't think the audience understands, like they drop a buzzword and you're ahead of the curve. So somebody here will say, you know, the ROI on that and say, I'll just say very briefly,

the return on investment. And I'll say, yeah, return on investment. And then, well, they'll say, you know, you're LTV. And I say, you know what? Would you explain LTV for somebody in the audience who has never heard that before? And then sometimes a magical moment will happen. Well, they'll give a great example and they'll dig a little deeper. Finally, my secret to interviewing people is I don't have a giant list of questions that I'm

trying to get through. I might have three or four topics I want to hit, but I listen to people's answers so intently. And I write down keywords. So if somebody was talking and they said, you know, and that was, you know, it was like the time I met Steve Jobs. And of course, then I went to work for Amazon and then I just write down Steve Jobs. And I say, you know, you mentioned that last answer. You met Steve Jobs. When did you meet Steve? Again, short answer, but you got to be present because what you don't realize is the audience is listening to the answer and they're forming their own follow-up questions. If you can then channel a listener while you're in an interview, which is a difficult test to do to be that present, but if you can actually channel the listener and when you

hear them mention something, whether it's an acronym or an anecdote or just a side note they drop, like when they say, that's another story, whereby that's a story for another day, you want to write that down and follow up on that. Not necessarily the third or fourth question you've got written down on your piece of paper. Don't be a slave to your list of questions. Be prepared for the interview, but don't be a slave to that list of questions. Does that make sense? It does. Thank you so much. Any follow-ups, Joey? Yeah, so, I mean, do you think it, I guess, would it become easier once you have several guests and people kind of start following you? I mean, right now it's just been cold calling people, cold emails, and I've had some success, but, you know, going forward, I'm hoping to get more

people on them. Yeah, I mean, listen, you're starting from zero. I assume you're not like a known quantity. You don't have 100,000 followers on Twitter, right? Right. So, but you have a niche, Austin startups. I'm not going to Austin and interviewing the 50 startups there. I might have the top two startups on the podcast in the next year or two. Those other 48 startups are not getting on this week in startups. We're too busy. We have too many people trying to get on the show, but you've got them in your backyard. So you can beat me this week in startups. You can beat me to those startups and get them when they're five-person companies, which, by the way, is what I did to get where I am, a thousand and episodes in with six full-time people working on the podcast. The reason I'm here is because

we never stopped and because in the early days we had this kid's Kevin from his company, Bourbon was failing and he pivoted to this Instagram thing. And we had them on the pod when he had five people. We had this kid Travis on who was in two cities with his, you know, Uber app. You'll hit one of those. Just like a venture capitalist or an angel investor hits an interesting investment every 25 to 50. You're going to hit some interesting guest every 25 to 50. So you have a have to ask yourself, well, why am I doing this? If you're doing it because you're passionate about entrepreneurship and talking to entrepreneurs and telling their stories, the reward is in the interview. It's in the discussion. So if you love the discussion with founders, that's your reward.

And then anything that happens after you publish for that founder, for you, for the audience, is icing on the cake. I just love having the great conversation. I would do these conversations anyway. I used to do them over lunch 10 years ago. I would just have lunch with one or two interesting people a week. I was always trying to book an interesting lunch or an interesting dinner or an interesting breakfast. That was like my sport back in the day. I just say, hey, can I have lunch with you? I want to have dinner at some point.

I love to share a meal. And people are busy. And the podcast is a much better venue than just doing lunch or dinner because they get something out of it. It promotes their business. They get to tell their story, et cetera. So and just try to be a better interviewer every time. And don't worry about being small.

Don't worry about getting like nascent companies. That's actually your strength. worry about consistency and quality. Are you consistently publishing this every week, week in and week out? 100% of podcasting is showing up. That's job one. You have to show up and do 100 episodes. When you hit 100 episodes, now you've actually become part of the top 5%.

Most people in podcasting never get to episode 100. So your job is to have great audio, the best guest you can, the best conversation you can and get to 100. And when you get to 100, you call back into S-Jason and then I'll tell you the next secrets. Awesome. Sounds great to me. All right, Joey. Get back to work. Thanks so much. Do the work. All right. Take care. All right. Be good. Listen, I know you're running a very complicated startup and you've got multiple projects going on concurrently. You've got multiple pokers in the fire. And you're trying to figure out what is the ground truth. What is actually going on in your organization? Well, unlock your team's potential with Monday.com. Monday.com is an intuitive work

OS that powers teams to run workflows, processes, and projects in one digital workspace. Teams can share projects and workflows in minutes on a platform that quickly adapts to your shifting needs. And it liberates the team from all this grunt work. And it connects them in one collaborative workspace. You can customize workflow templates to manage anything your way. Time tracking to meet important deadlines, dashboards, to gain valuable insights at a glance. Press is using Monday here in our organization. when we look at potential accelerator companies to come to the launch accelerator. And he chats with them to see if they're a good fit or not for the accelerates.

Sometimes they've made too much progress. Sometimes they have not made enough progress. In both cases, we want to keep in touch with those people and make them feel good about the projects. So he separates them into our Goldilocks zone. He also adds notes in the comments section so the team can easily view what the next recommended steps are. Join over 100,000 companies that use Monday.com to focus. on the work that requires their true talents. Start your 14-day free trial by going to Monday.com slash twist.

Monday, like the day of the week, dot com slash twist. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, Dan sent us a voicemail. Let's hear the question. Hey, Jason, this is Dan from Tampa, Florida, and I've got a bit of a chicken and egg problem for you. I've got two ideas and not sure where to start. The first is a health-focused app

that combines the best elements of calorie tracking, fasting, and meditation. The second is a unique health supplement different from anything that's on the market that's focused on both busy professionals and the 55 and overcrowed. So my question for you is, am I better off producing the supplement first trying to drive product sales and drive people to the app? Or am I better off building the app first, trying to get people to use it and then pushing the product through there? Both would be about the same cost initially to produce. but if I do the supplement first, I'd be able to use those profits to then fund the production of the app, assuming that it sells. Thanks a lot. Love the show.

All right. Great question, Dan. And we see this a lot. People have a bunch of ideas and they're trying to pick between them. And it's not uncommon for a creative, driven person to have 10 great ideas in the same week. And if you're in my business, like you're an angel investor, you're hearing great ideas constantly. Your mind becomes this fountain of great ideas. You can just riff forever. If you work at Pixar, you can come up with story ideas for Oscar winning movies while you're sleeping or

while you're biking or in the shower or playing tennis and they just go by. Our brains are amazing at spewing ideas constantly. Now, ideas are easy. Execution is hard. Just in terms of your app, you're talking about going up against zero the fasting app by Kevin Rose meditation apps by Sam Harris com.com the leader and the one we invested in headspace and countless others and calorie counting apps where some of them are even visual so you're not just talking about creating one app you're talking about creating three apps and going up against people in that space

now the truth is we are now in the probably six seven eighth inning of calorie counting apps. Fasting apps were in the first or second ending and meditation were probably in the third or fourth inning. So a lot of the work that is out there, you could copy, crib, or be inspired by, uh, and just basically steal. So making an app that combines those three things holistically is kind of a great idea. I'll be totally honest. I use my fasting app and I use my meditation app. Their best of breed. I use calm and I use zero. And that gives them a hundred percent of the real estate, but I also use Fitbit and I use Eight Sleep. And so now I've got four different

apps that I'm using literally every day around my health. And I'm not sure I want them in one, but I kind of want them sharing information. So somebody will someday be able to incorporate all of these things, but it probably is unlikely to be you. I'll be totally honest. You seem to have an advantage in the health supplement. You seem to have a high margin. in that. So instead of going up against incredibly well-funded meditation apps, incredibly well-funded and focused fasting apps and legions of calorie-counting apps that are non-differentiated, why not do the supplement, as you're saying, which you have an advantage in, you understand obviously, and then you could work backwards to the app. Another possibility is to go to the

different apps out there and say, I have this supplement, and I want to promote your app and try to do cut a business development deal with them. Maybe some of them will let you advertise in their app. I know, you know, Com doesn't have that kind of stuff. But you might find some apps that already have scale that you could either buy with your profits because people don't know how to make money in these apps.

And it would be really interesting to have a fasting app or a meditation app that work together. That could be an interesting place. So I do like the idea of you going with the money printing thing first. It's always a good idea to have cash flow to then invest in the things that might take longer to make money. So if you were Uber, you would not do Uber Eats and UberPool first. I tell the story all the time. They started with Uber Black, which was high margin.

Then they went to UberX. Then they went to Uber Pool and Uber Eats. And then on to micromobility. A company like Lyme or Scoot or a bunch of these, you know, micromobility startups, they started with micromobility, which is the thinnest margins. the hardest to get a network effect going. And, yeah, like, I think bird is the only one that's going to come out alive out of that scooting thing. And they're going to have spent hundreds of millions to billions of dollars.

And it's going to be hard. And they're going to probably get through it by the skin of their teeth because it's a hard, hard, hard space. If Uber and Lyft make micromobility part of their apps, they don't need to make a profit from it. So here's the thing. your margin is my opportunity is a saying we have here in the valley so if combs and and headspace charge and zero fasting eventually starts charging and these calorie counting ones maybe you give your premium um apps out either you get it for free if you buy the supplement or it's a hundred dollars a year

so you could say in the app it's a hundred dollars a year or free for people who've bought our supplement one time and they get it for life now you use the app as base to get them and get their credit cards. So for sure, go with the money printing machine you know first. Good question, Dan. All right. Next up is Alex. Alex, where are you calling from?

Hi, I'm calling from San Francisco. Okay. Are you quarantined in place? I'm walking outside. The air is clean, so it's good. So tell me, what's your question? So my question is about recession-proof startups taking advantage of recession.

So we saw, you know, 2,8 to 10 from strong companies emerged, a few years later, one of them being shoprified. You know, the time of riots by accident, and ours people were building their companies and small shops.

So, you know, I'm exploring the space now and see what's next, if this is a downturn, what someone can build to come out, you know, victorious on the other end. That's a great question, Alex. And so, as I always tell people, fortunes are made in the down market.

They're collected in the up market. People who are building companies tend to build them through the down market. And when you have a down market, you don't have as much competition for employees and great team members. You have consolidation of talent into the best ideas as opposed to the CMO, the VP of Sales, and the chief product officer all launched their own startup. Those three people get together and you got an actual band. where instead of the drummer becoming the lead singer and the bass player becoming a lead singer in their own bands, you have a band of like really strong players.

So that's one of the things that's nice about a down market is the talent coalesces behind the best ideas. And marketing becomes cheaper and there's less noise out there. So that's what a down market is great for. What a down market is not great for is obviously raising money becomes a little bit harder. Sometimes customers are a little less willing to give you their money. but generally speaking, there's going to be money out there because so much has been raised by funds. So the other part of your question here is what comes out of a recession, right? And it's easy to look in hindsight and say, wow, look, Facebook came out of that post.com era.

And you saw Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Tesla, and Shopify, as you mentioned, come out of the 2008 Great Recession. generally speaking, I don't know if it's sector specific, but this is a very unique one with coronavirus because people did not believe in remote work. And then we started to see remote work companies Excel like InVision or WordPress, but they were still considered kind of weird, right? Like they might be unique, small cultures. Now you see Twitter, Google, everybody else saying, just stay home, don't come to work. We're going to figure out how to make it work. that helps Slack and Zoom and other remote technologies. But I don't think that coronavirus is going to reset and then everybody just stays home from now on.

After this thing's over, people are going to come to work. So I don't know if there's a major opportunity here in remote work. I think that was already moving. I see a ton of pitches for remote work startups. So I don't think this is a strong enough trend that, you know, it's going to make a bunch of startups. That was already happening. So it's going to accelerate. the trend. And I think what you'll see is people are going to learn how to use the tools better.

And then people who didn't try the tools will be incentivized to try them. So if you've never done Zoom calls or if you weren't into Slack and your company got quarantined right now or you were told to work from home, all of a sudden the CEO and the CFO who are 62 years old and were told they have to stay home, well, now they're in a Slack room for the first time. And they're trying to figure out how to use emojis and Giffy and how to use threads and how does this thing work. Like that's literally what's going to happen over the next 30 days is a bunch of oldsters who don't know how to use this technology are going to be on Zoom calls and they're going to be like, oh my God, this is amazing. I can drop my kids off of school, go home, eat breakfast, work out, and do four

hours of work a day and pretend I did eight. As opposed to what people do now is they go into their offices, they work for eight hours and they surf the web for four of them and they actually do their creative work for four hours a day. There's a theory that people are only doing four hours of work a day and the other four hours are just filled with surf in the web and doing other nonsense and socializing in meetings. There might be some truth to that, right? Meeting culture. So I think efficiency will come out of this. But I don't know that there's in what we're going to be able to put a specific trend on this and say, I mean, I actually look at it and think robotics and health. I think the thing that might come out of this is robotics and food chain. People are forgetting that the

likely source of this was a wet market in China, which was the likely source of the other outbreaks that have happened. And that food chain supply is critically important for the spreading of diseases. And then personal space, shaking hands, all of these bad traditions. So it might not be startups that change. It might be food chain regulation around the stuff. I can't imagine people in China who know that this came out if they in fact know, because they control the media. there, but if they in fact know that this was likely caused by a, you know, big open air market where people are slaughtering animals in a very, you know, bloody and disgusting and close quarters kind of way, they might rethink that type of marketplace and maybe put

refrigeration and sterilization and other cleaning kind of habits into them. And then also in America, we're going to, I think the last thing they hear might be shaking hands and hugging each other or in Italy shaking hands and kissing each other in their cheek. Like, these kind of very, close personal interactions might need to stop. That might be what comes out of this. But great question and good luck with your startup. Thank you much. Thank you later.

Okay. Cheers. Have a great day. Are you crazy about efficiency? Well, I am and you know that. And if you're running a startup, you need to be super efficient. And you've probably got tons of SMS messages coming in, emails for customer support, and you're having all these conversations in single player mode.

In other words, you've got all these threads inside of your email. Well, what if you could play multiplayer email? Well, that's what Front lets you do. And I have a portfolio company named Look. And they are a talent marketplace, and we have invested in this company. And their CEO, Zach, runs the entire company on Front. They've eliminated over 3,500 internal emails a month because he's better able to manage the team and what everybody's talking about with different customers.

If you want to find a better way to manage all of these emails, Front will transform your corporate email into multiplayer so you can create simple little email addresses like support or team at your company. And you can do interesting things like put DMs into there or you can use Zapier to move these interactions back and forth. You know how to do that. So if you want to be bionic, if you want to make your team able to handle this day luge and put out all these fires and manage all that work email, I want you to take 20% off

your first year. That is a big, big, generous offer from them. And it's a very affordable product, to be honest. They charge probably too little. It's Front app, F-R-O-N-T-A-P-P-com slash Twist for more information. And just use that code Twist when you sign up at frontapp.com slash twist. Everybody uses the product, not just my portfolio company. Look, many of portfolio companies are using it.

I use it all the time. And Shopify, HubSpot, MailChimp, and over 5,500 other businesses around the world rely on front to manage their email. It's a new approach to email. It's this team sport. And boy, does it make your company bionic? Go to frontapp.com slash twist. All right, Karen has a great email question. Are there any reoccurring personality traits you've noticed in the most successful founders

and the most successful investors you've ever met? This is a great question. And as investors, we're always trying to think about metacognition. We're thinking about thinking. We're thinking about decision making. We're thinking about how we make bets. So there's a lot of discussion when you're amongst the investor class or even the founder class about what works.

And we do this because the outliers are so gigantic and the failures are so frequent that we cannot figure out why certain startups that we didn't expect to win win big and then why others that seem like a layup, seem like a certainty. So there's a lot written about this. I have my own theories. And if I were to break it down for founders, it wouldn't be too different, in fact, than investors. But I would say that the overall, the people that I meet who are very self-possessed, you know, they're composed, they're collected, they have this trait that they're very secure in who they are and what they're doing. Self-possessed is the word for this. You meet these people,

sometimes. And maybe earlier in life, they seem spastic and all over the place or confused. And then you meet some people and they're like, this is why I'm here. This is what I'm doing. Here's how we're going about it. And this is the destination. They seem self-possessed. They seem confident. Right. And the second thing is there's a level of resiliency in these people. So not only do they know they want to make an electric car or they know they want to connect the world or they know they want to index the world's information, whatever their stated mission is. There's some clarity about that and there's some resiliency. They're not going to give up.

You don't get the sense that they're going to hit a wall or a bad beat or are they going to get dealt some bad cards in life and they're going to just give up and fold. They're resilient, which means, you know, they have to be very flexible and they have to bend and contort themselves to make the vision reality and get around those obstacles. So they don't break. they bend. When things become hard, they figure out a way. And that's that cleverness is a component of resiliency. There's not giving up, but there's also this flexibility and this creativeness in conquering whatever it is that is forcing you to be resilient in that moment, right? So it's a little bit of McGiver combined with, I'm just never going to give up and that pig-headedness. And that's where I see founders sometimes become embattled. They want to be resilient, but they're not being creative

enough to solve the problem. So they don't want to give up. They don't want to retreat, but they can't figure out how to creatively get themselves out of a situation. Part of getting yourself to the promised land is not giving up, and part of it is being creative and flexible enough to figure out how to get there if the path you chose at the beginning of your journey doesn't get you there. So self-possessed, resilient. And number three, they're the voracious learners. They read everything. They ask questions. They interview people. Bezos falls into this category. I've had a meeting with Bezos before. It's supposed to be like a 10, it was supposed to be a 20-minute meeting. It wound up being an hour. I had a meeting with Masayoshi-san one time. It was supposed

to be 45 minutes. It turned into two meetings of three hours each. Like they, when they find somebody who's smart or they find somebody who's interesting or they find somebody they can learn from, they just ask question after question. And when I was in that meeting with Bezos talking about Weblogs Inc, he was like, how do you come up with the names, Engadget? How do you build brands? Why aren't you one brand like Amazon instead of making Engadget, Autoblog, and Joystick? He had very specific questions and he listened to the answers and he was super present.

So when you find somebody who's self-possessed, they're resilient, and they're voracious learners, that to me is this trifecta that makes them unstoppable because they're going to ask the questions they need, they're not going to give up, they're going to come up with creative solutions, and you're not going to knock them, like they're going to wake up tomorrow, like Elon must not waking up tomorrow and going, you know what, I wonder if I should build rockets today, you know, or Evan Williams not waking up tomorrow and saying, I wonder if I should keep pursuing self-publishing and medium after doing Twitter and blogger, right? Like he knows why he's here on planet earth. Now, when you go to investors, they, I think, have to have the ability to work with strong

personalities. So the ability to interact with people who are very different in a range and are very strong personalities, this is, I don't have the word for it, but I can only explain it as somebody who could walk into a biker bar and then walk next store into a fine dining establishment and have a conversation with the chef of the fine dining establishment while talking to the biker about their life and that ability to talk to anybody and to listen to them deeply and to interview them and ask the right questions. This is this inquisitiveness and this tolerance for ambiguity and a tolerance for risk that I see in the great investors.

Again, back to the voracious learners, that's like a default as well for this group. They are just going to search for information. They're going to ask questions. Resiliency, you know, you don't need to be necessarily resilient because you've placed 30 bets. You don't need to be resilient about the 25 who go under.

You just have to be able to weather the storm. It's not like you have to die on that hill. You can lose those 25 battles and just win the 26th and be a legend. Literally, you can lose 25, battles and win the 26th and win the war. As Mark Cuban says, you only have to be right once. That's different than an entrepreneur. Entrepreneur's got to make it work. They get three or four swings at bat in a career. Yeah, they only have to be right once, but they're only getting three

or four swings at a bat. If you were to spend 30 years as a founder, as a founder, you might do, I don't know, maybe five startups of six years each on average. And maybe one of them goes 10 and that's your big winner and the other ones go three. For an event, You could go 30 years, and during that, you could have 10 funds. And in those 10 funds, you could have two of them overperform and eight of them do okay or be negative. So it's a different type of resiliency. You have to be able to weather the storm, but you're not going to be made or broken by any of them. So it really takes that ability to work with people.

That is the key to be, I don't want to use the word likable. You have to be able to engage people deeply. and these are strong personalities. So very, very high EQ. That emotional quotient has to be off the charts because you're dealing with personalities who are, as I said earlier, they're very self-possessed.

It's not like I'm going to say to Travis when running Uber or Alex when running calm, like, I think you should do this and they're going to just do it. No, even if I was right and I saw something they didn't, I can't just walk in and go, you know what, turn left. They're going to say, why? Why should I turn left? Well, I'm going

straight. I'm not going left. And you're going to have to have this really deep, considered debate and discussion with them. And it might take 10 debates and it might take five years for them to know why you said left if you're, if you were guaranteed to be right. And you might not be right. So the ability to work with others is the key for investors. And you have to learn. You have to be able to do this metacognition because you have to be aware of your own bias. And just because I won with Uber or Com or Robin Hood and I saw traits in those founders, doesn't mean that applies in the future. I've constantly got to be sharpening my edge and thinking about the next investment.

And am I taking some biases of what worked in the past, some survivorship bias or some confirmation bias? And that's why investors are so obsessed with thinking about how they think. There's a book called Range. and I'm listening to it now. It's a great book. And I know Bill Gurley likes it and a lot of other investors seem to like it, about how some of the best ways to really have breakout thinking is to be,

to understand what's worked in many different fields. So if you learn something about how Mike Ovitz built CAA, could that apply to how you run a venture firm? Could that apply to how you run a sports team? If you learn something about how a sports team was able to win from, and Phil Jackson won or Mike Dantonie one, could you apply that to business or to the stock market, right? That ability to see things that worked in other fields and then apply them to adjacencies

or things that are very far off. The same way money ball. They took quantitative analysis and stock analysis and they applied it to baseball and it worked, right? That's that kind of nonlinear adjacency thinking that is making some investors able to run slack like a consumer company even though it's an enterprise company, right? that's like where big things happen. Okay, great question and we think about it a lot. All right. Next up is Blaze. Blaze. Where are you calling from?

South Lake City, Utah. Very nice. I was just in Park City. What a beautiful state and city you're from. What is your question? So I'm wondering, is a startup turning a startup, good idea or not, is it basically a get rich quick scheme or is it a valuable investment of my time? Okay. So the question is, because you broke up a little bit that over the phone, when considering equity is joining a startup a get rich quick scheme or is it a valuable investment of my time? So most startups fail, 70, 80% of them fail. As they get product market fit, the mortality rate will plummet, right? And you'll start to have survivorship and the chances of your options being worth something go up. So joining a startup before the product is launched, you have an 80 or 90%

chance that that's going to zero. In other words, your equity is worth nothing. Now, if you join the startup when they have $10,000 to $50,000 a month in revenue, the chances of a positive outcome now go to maybe 30, 40%, in my mind, maybe even 50%, who knows. Now if the company gets, you gets to a million dollars a month in revenue is doing $10 million a year. They probably have 100 employees. There's still a startup, but that equity is probably on the right track, but you're going to get less of it. So when you join earlier, you get more. When you join later, you get less. So the entry point is very important. And there is a sweet spot there. And the sweet spot I would define is under $5 million in revenue, but over $500,000 a year. If you join a startup between

those two moments, the chances are you're going to get a nice equity package and the chances are going to be much higher. So there's a sweet spot in there. Now, you also want to join a company that you're passionate about because life is short and you're going to spend five years, four years vesting that, maybe five years at the company. So you want to pick a great company and you should look at your equity as the icing on the cake unless you find and you're really diligent about finding a company that's doubling revenue year after year. If you're early in your career, it's hard to identify these companies because you're a neophyte. You don't know. So I just gave you some broad strokes of how to address this just based on revenue and traction. You can also

look at who the investors are. If Sequoia is investing in the company, if Bill Gurley and benchmark, if Chamath is investing in the company from social capital, if Founders Fund is investing. If David Sacks from Kraft is investing, these are signals that serious people with serious funds are investing in the company, the equity is worth more. And you should always try to negotiate for more equity. So this is the second piece. When you do find you're on a rocket ship and you can tell from the statistics that it's going great, it has great leadership, it has great investors, and the revenue is doubling every six months. That's what you're looking for in a startup. The revenue to double every six months. In order for revenue to double every six months,

you would divide the number six. You would divide, let's say, 15% into six, and that would be about five point whatever, so every five months or so it's going to double. So you divide 15% the number 15 into 72. It means the revenue is doubling every six months or so. That's a great company to be involved with. But that's not the only reason to join a startup.

Really the reason to join a startup is you want to have more responsibility, you want to work harder, you want to sharpen your skills, and you want to take a decade out of your career path. That's what really startups are about. When you go to a startup in the first two or three years, you have one person doing five to ten jobs in those early years of a startup. So when you join a startup,

you might be in operations and you have to do, find the office, you have to do the HR, you've got to manage the accounting, and you're doing the ad buying for the paid advertising. You've got four different job functions. Now the company gets to 500 people, You've got 15 people in facilities managing the office. You've got 50 people on the paid advertising team. And so the jobs then become each person is doing 2% of a particular function.

Each person is doing 50% or 30% of a function because you have 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 10 people doing it. That's the reason to join a startup is that you're going to become incredibly deft at the key skills. So I would look at skills, skills and responsibility and the equity becomes the icing. And then if you crush it, don't be afraid after a year to say to your founders, listen, I crushed it on these things. I'm the first person in the office. I'm the last person to leave. I took on these three projects.

Two of them went incredible. Here's my track record. Can I get more equity? And they'll be like, whoa. And if you had a raise coming up, they say, hey, we're giving you a 6% raise. You say, hey, you know what? Can I take a 4% raise and get more equity? your founder's going to come and give you a giant hug.

Chris are like, you want more skin in the game? Great. Or you might be able to say to them, listen, I would like to buy some shares of the company. Is there an opportunity for me to buy shares in a company if you know that the company is doing well? And if you were to do this in the model I'm talking about, finding that Goldilog zone, not too hot, not too cold, asking for more equity and increasing your skill massively by taking on every project you can

and at nights and weekends, instead of watching four hours of TV a day, watch only one and put the other the three into skills and learning skills, you will then write your own ticket. And if you don't make money on the first three startups you work on on the equity, you will build a skill set that is amazing and you'll double your salary in those five or ten years. And then eventually, hopefully, you join a rocket ship. And that's really what it's about. It's trying to find a rocket ship when it's just leaving and going to orbit. Not in orbit yet. And if you can get on it when it's on the launching pad, oh my lord.

If the people who were able to get on Google or Facebook and had a sense about that, they did very well, or Uber or Lyft or Slack. So you really want to try to get on that launch pad of a great rocket chip. But don't use just your emotion about it. Look at the metrics. What's revenue? What's the growth rate, right? So if we're at a hundred.

If the company's not hitting revenue within, because I'm at a startup, I've been there within for about four months, about seven months. months old. When do I call it quick? It's still pre-revenue. So, yeah, I mean, listen, you're at a pre-revenue company, which means you're going to learn a ton. So I would look at it and say, am I learning? And are we on a plan? And are these founders just amazing? If the founders are not amazing and you can jump on a better rocket ship, don't be afraid to do that. And that's one of the key things that gets people tripped up. They join one company. They want to stay there for two, three, four years, which is reasonable and in fact responsible.

And then another rocket ship shows up and they're like, oh my God, that thing's growing faster. It's better. The management's better. The investors are better. And they don't leave the place they're at because they've only been there for nine months. Don't be afraid to leave a company if there is a much better opportunity out there because the decoherents, the $100 billion companies, the $10, $20 billion companies. They only come along one in every thousand or 2,000 companies. And if you are lucky enough to see one, that's like you're on the local train.

You ever on the local train in Manhattan? You get to 14th Street. You see the express. And you're just sitting there on the local and the express leaves. And then another express comes and you're like still sitting on the local because you got some crazy,

you know, sunk cost into the local. Get the hell off the local and run across and try to get on that express train. Yeah. Never been to New York. But I get your point. Yeah. All right, man.

Good luck with it. And we'll talk soon. Thank you very much. Cheers. All right. We got another email. This one's from Patrick. How does one score an internship or entry-level job at launch or twist?

What's the best way to get on Jason's radar? That's a great one. I can tell you a couple of stories. You know, sometimes we go do a job search and we find somebody. That's one way. But we don't have a lot of jobs here. It's like a 12-person team. And so we might have a specific need like producing the podcast that requires like a specific

skill set. And one way that worked was people who've been in our portfolio. who did a great job as portfolio companies and then had an exit with their company, then come work with us. So that's where we really are focusing our attention from the investment side. We want the people who went through the launch accelerator or a portfolio to come work for us because we've got that shared DNA. So that's a pretty easy way to do it. The best way to get on my radar, I think, is the people who are fans of the show who watch every episode and tweet about it or write blog posts about what they learn from the show. I can't not see that stuff because

at mentioning me. So putting aside myself, you know, I had somebody who works here, Press, who's an associate now, who did growth for me for two years. And before that, was just a super fan of the pod. I previously had somebody who was a super fan of the podcast who came to work for us, then we backed his startup, then he worked for us again. So we've had many times people who are super fans of the podcast who embrace the podcast, who are part of it, come work for us. And that's really the way to ingratiate yourself to any high profile person on the web or in podcasting is to just consume their content and ask intelligent questions about it, create content based on it, or amplify it.

So I am a big fan of Preet Bahar's podcast. Stay tuned as an example. And I don't know if Preet knows me or not, but I've tweeted it about the podcast maybe 10 or 20 times. And I've tweeted at him. I've mentioned Anne Realgram in it. I'm assuming that at some point they saw that. These are very popular high profile people. Now, if I really wanted to work for Preet or Anne Milgram on Stay Tuned, I would just take every episode and write a blog post about it. Or I clip it and say, these are my favorite moments.

That's the way to sort of stalk somebody through using their content and celebrating them and being interested in them as opposed to you. The way to not get it is to write your life story and email them. Here's my life story. It's like, well, nobody really cares. People are busy. What you really want to do is show that you're engaging on the topics they care about. And you can target people like this on social media so easily. This is one of the things Gary Vaynerchuk has been going hyper about for going on two decades

now is that you can get to anybody on social media or get to anybody because of their podcast now. You just participate in it. So you call in, you send letters, you subscribe to it. If they got a Patreon, you post comments. I'm also into Brett Easton Ellis's podcast because I'm into film. And when I get my Patreon notice that he's got a new episode out, maybe one out of five times I'll click through after I listen.

to it and write a comment. I just think those are like the nice ways to engage people in a non-creepy productive way. It doesn't mean you're going to get the job, but it does mean you might get an interview, right? And that's really all you can do. And some of these jobs are really hard to get. Like getting a job in venture capital, the hardest seat you can get. And if you get one, you don't want to lose it. Okay, great question. All right. Another great email question coming in. This one from James, how can a young, scrappy, early stage venture firm differentiate themselves from the PAC to attract great young founders. Okay, great question.

When I started in this game, I had events, I had my blog, I had my email newsletter, I had a podcast. Now, if you look around the landscape, it seems like that's become table stakes for a lot of venture firms. You saw Andreessen Horowitz copied my playbook. Mark Seusser copied my playbook. They all did events, podcasts, email newsletters, et cetera. And the only people who really did that in the early days was probably Fred

Wilson, who was into blogging and Bradfeld. So there was an early cohort of us who realized sharing your ideas and your thoughts was a good idea. Literally 10, 15 years ago, venture capitalists did not want to have their names out there. They were very on the, they were on the DL big time. Now it's become a popularity contest because you want to get deal flow. So what I would say is making it very clear to people what you invest in and when you invest and then trying to engage those people and be massively helpful for them. doing a conference or doing a podcast at this point that's kind of flooded and it's kind of a

cliche and it's a lot of work. I would try to find a new medium that you can own. So Gary Tan, who's been on the pod a couple times, who did posterists, always was a fan of his startups. He's doing kind of like the Casey Neistat, you know, short vignette videos with a lot of B-roll. And they're actually really good. You know, they're short, they're different. You look at Naval. Naval is doing these short 90-second, three-minute podcasts that are basically about philosophy and life. They have nothing to do with entrepreneurship. He'll talk about wealth creation. But he's basically doing a podcast that's about philosophy.

And you know what? I don't know if he's doing it to get deal flow, but I can tell you he's going to get a ton of deal flow because people love the stoicism and et cetera. So you've got to find something that is true to who you are. If you're an introvert, running events is not going to work very well for you, is it? Running a podcast may not if you're not into talking. But if you're an introvert who's a great writer or you're an introvert who makes great software, lean into what your skill is and then try to dovetail that with the market. So let's say you're investing in enterprise software and you're a developer.

Well, and you're introvert, you don't want to do a podcast. You don't want to do events. You don't want to be putting yourself out there. You find it exhausting. Well, what's a tool that you could build? that would allow enterprise software people to get value. So if enterprise software people are constantly dealing with churn, and you made a tool that let people rate your product,

and you made it free, and it was called, you know, SaaS NPS, and it was just an NPS score for SaaS companies, and you made this little tool and put it out in the world and said any SaaS company can use this tool to get feedback from their customer base. I made it for free. If anybody wants it's open source, it's over here. that would be a beautiful way to create something that's in your wheelhouse, that's your skill set, and share it with the world and provide value. Navaul said something to me when we both were in

angel investing, we both started to get a lot of attention maybe seven, eight, nine years ago. And he said to me, Jason, the reason we're winning is because we're in a competition to see who can be the most helpful and we're being the most helpful. He was running venture hacks and an email list and I was running Open Angel for him at the time. It was predated Angel list, predated the indicate predated the launch accelerator. And Paul Graham was another person who was being super helpful to people. So it really is a competition to see who can be the most helpful to founders. Look at your own skill set, look at your team's skill set, and then build some products around

that. If you come out of product design and you're just great at UX, why not offer a free UX course to founders and say, we'll redesign your product for you? and we're doing like a hackathon the first weekend of every month where we take five startups and we help them redesign their product. By the way, Google did that.

Google Ventures had a design clinic where they would bring startups in and they had a couple of designers on staff and they'd run them through a three or four day process of making their product more beautiful. So look in your heart, look at your skill set, look at the skill set of your team,

figure out what it is you love to do that is helpful to startups and productize it in some way. Productize it in some way. That means, to do it on some regular, systematic basis that people can engage with very easily. We created something called Founder University because we wanted to meet more female founders and underrepresented founders, which is typically Latina, Latinx, and black founders.

And you know what? The number of black founders, Latin founders, and female founders we've been able to invest in has gone through the roof just by doing this two-day free seminar in person for 60 people called Founder. Dot University. So look at your skill. My skill is talking, as you know. and live events and maybe having dialogue with people

because I'm a high extrovert, that doesn't mean that's the only way to do it. If you're an introvert, do things that introverts like. If you're a developer, do what developers like. If you're a recruiter, do what recruiters like. You know, there's so many different ways to do this, but the core is always be humble and understand you're in a service business.

Never get high on your own supply. And when you see VCs on Twitter doing tweet storms about how you know you have to find one of their founders like it's some goddamn you know uh you know egg hunt on Easter Sunday or you're putting them on a scavenger hunt to try to get to you well you know what you're being a douche and everybody sees that like don't get high in your own supply we are here to service founders through products and services and money and the money by the way is 90% of it the founders are not going to investors because they want to hang out with them very rare instances. They're generally going there to get a check. And you're deluding yourself

that you're popular because you have money and a checkbook. You're not, in fact, popular. Money is popular. So get that through your goddamn head. VCs who are high on your own supply. Nobody likes you. Nobody wants to hang out with you. They want your money. Period. I'm self-aware to understand this. I understand that people don't want to hang with me. Maybe after I give them money, we create a relationship and maybe they do on the margins. This is a financial services business. We're here to give money to founders and support the hell out of them. The support the hell out of them is 10, 20% of the battle.

The check is 80, 90% of battle in the minds of the founders. If the money is green and you get the money to them on time at a fair price and you're responsive to signing documents, you're going to be a great investor. It really is about getting them the money. So don't overthink it. You have money. It's going to be fine.

Great question.