This Week in Startups - E1072 Ask Jason: Growing as a leader, managing more experienced employees as a young CEO, Consumer SaaS pricing tips, bull markets post-COVID & more

Episode Date: June 9, 2020

0:01 Jason teases today's questions 2:09 Luai: Is Uber still a hyper-growth company? 5:25 Weston: Advice on getting in front of/selling to startups/enterprises outside of our immediate VC network? 8:13 Martin: Do you have any resources, insights, or methods about how to get to the right price for a consumer subscription service? 12:58 Topher: What is a good shipping cadence for new code? How often should I be pushing code to production and releasing new updated versions of my app? 15:42 Delane: When you started your first business, what were your strengths/weaknesses as a manager/leader? What was young Jason like as a CEO, and how has he evolved into your current self? 19:28 Mary: In your early days, what was your leadership style towards people who were older/more experienced than you? What advice would you give a young founder for hiring older/experienced people? 20:57 Emily: If the worst of COVID has passed, what markets are you most bullish on Post-COVID? Where do you think we will see the most innovation going forward? 26:43 Danielle: What are some insights gained since taking your team fully remote? 35:15 Matt: Could you ever see an Uber/Lyft merger? What would need to take place for that to happen? 36:29 Chris: Would you rather invest in a high-growth, high-burn startup OR a moderate-growth, minimal-burn startup? 38:57 James: What software stack does LAUNCH use? Which apps are integral to your team's success and why?

Okay, it's Jason. I'm here at home, working from home during the coronavirus. And we've got a lot of amazing questions today. I just want to start out the podcast by saying we're thinking about the protest and justice here in America. It's obviously heartbreaking to see what we've seen. And it's also inspiring to see us maybe coming to some realization that we need to rethink policing. I've got a lot of thoughts and feelings on it where we've reached out to a number of high profile African American founders and investors and we're going to be having that conversation as well in dedicated episodes. And I just want to say that off the bat lest you think that we're not going to cover it here on the podcast.

We're just trying to get the right people on the pod and booking guests as we speak. So in today's All Ask Jason, somebody asked me as Uber still a high growth company. Somebody asks about my thoughts on pricing for consumer business. I have a lot of thoughts on that, a lot of best practices. People ask me to be introspective and talk about my strengths and weaknesses as a leader and how I've adapted over time. So I put it all out there. And let's just say you're either going to love or hate working for me based on the answer.

If I'm bullish on startups and which specific categories post COVID-19 and if I think COVID-19 is going to have a lasting impact, you might be interested in my answer to that. And much, much more. Stick with us. This Week in Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Marketing. To redeem a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. And Clavio helps brands build relationships across any distance, delivering email marketing

moments your customers will appreciate, remember, and share. in good times and bad. Visit clavio.com slash twist today to start your free trial. That's KLAV-I-O dot com slash twist. Okay, next up, we have a question from Louis. A big fan of your work on podcasts. I heard you in a CNBC interview saying that Uber is not the same growth or it's a limited growth company now due to its new management.

In the Middle East, they're buying out all of the main. major right sharing apps and they also have plans now with the US to buy Grubhub. Do you still stand behind your analysis that they're not the same growth company or their limited growth company? Okay, this is a great question. There's two things to parse out here. One is you have a manager in Dara who doesn't have founder authority. He's not the founder of the company.

He came in, he's a hired gun. And so he has to keep his job and he answers to a board. That means he can't make a crazy, aggressive move without getting the buy-in of that board. Whereas a founder of a company, let's take Tesla, Elon can make the cyber truck and he doesn't answer to anybody. He's the founder. Or Steve Jobs can say, you know what we're doing the iPhone first? Then we'll do the iPad.

I'm the founder. This is what we're doing. And so there is a founder authority issue. And that means you cannot be bold. And even in the acquisitions, someone like Zuckerberg can take this unilateral action and say, we're buying WhatsApp, we're buying Instagram, I control the board. The board can give me a high five about it, but they're not stopping me. And so even on M&A, you're neutered and you're slowed down if you are not the founder. And so that's what I mean by this comment. Now, that doesn't mean

that Uber is not going to outpace the market and be a fabulous investment. And I hope it is. I still have a large position in the company. And so I am very bullish in it, or I wouldn't. I would take the money out and put it in Disney. But I think they'll outperform something like Disney or Netflix. I believe that they're a high-growth stock, in fact. I do think, though, you have to realize when you take out that really hard-driving founder with that founder authority, you're just going to have a different type of growth and a different type of boldness. And I think what Dara is very good at is making people not pissed off about Uber and maybe

stopping the wartime culture that that company had when they were fighting with every region that wanted to stop them. So maybe it's actually the perfect situation where they went from a wartime company where they had to fight to even exist in each market because they were trying to be stopped by corrupt incumbents. And now they're on this reconciliation tour and maybe acting a little bit less aggressively in terms of how they attack a market, i.e. they're leaving markets if they can't be number one or number two, which in fairness was Travis's original position. We're either going to get the gold, the silver, but we're not settling. for bronze. In terms of buying up the competitors, I think that's something that naturally occurs.

And because Uber is the number one player in the space, naturally the consolidation will happen with them first. And then you might even see some companies consolidate with Lyft if they want to have a less competent, less scaled option in terms of selling their companies. Like if they can't sell it to Uber one, maybe they'll sell to the number two player or the number three player. So you will see some of that happen as well,

but that's kind of a negative signal in my mind. Okay, great question. Okay, let's take a question from Weston. Hey, Jason, this is Weston from 15 Finches. We're a startup focus creative studio, and we're launching a partnership program. So think accelerator meets full service, creative slash dev slash product shop.

We have a pretty good pipeline of startups right now that come through our VC network. So the question is, do you have any advice or recommendations for how we can get introduced or get in front of startups that are kind of outside of that immediate network? Okay, great question. And the idea of putting together a bunch of developer and design resources and an accelerator is one that most people in the community think has a weakness in it. I'm going to explain what that weakness is.

you're going to get a lot of idea people who want to build apps. And every single person on the planet, by definition, is an idea person because we have these giant brains that spew ideas all day long. So what's going to happen with your accelerator and the real weakness of it and the thing that you're going to have to route around is you're going to just get idea people who don't have the ability to execute and then you're now substituting your dev shop for their ability to execute. And then when you go away, you're going to have fished for all these.

these founders, giving them these beautiful fish, and then you leave and they starve to death because they don't know how to fish. They don't know how to build an app. So you might inadvertently negative signal the wrong people to come to your accelerator, which is just generic idea people, i.e. the average human. And what you really want when you're doing an accelerator is people who are resourceful and have the resources to either learn to be a developer, learn to be a UX and designer,

and learn those skills, or somebody who's so convincing as an idea person using quotes, an idea person, just also known as a person, you can then, you would much rather have the person who can find those resources and, you know, corral them and convince them. So if you want to find people, gosh, you know, going to your VC network, they're going to give you the rejects. They're going to give you the people who didn't have the ability to build apps and say, oh, you can't build an app. Oh, you're unable to convince a developer to work with you.

Oh, you don't have the ability to raise a seed round and find a developer and pay for them. Okay, yeah, you should go look at this accelerator. So I'm really concerned about the fundamental premise of your business. I don't think it's a good idea. I think if you're going to do this and you're smart enough to have your own development resources, why not just build your own ideas and do what's called a startup studio like Betoworks or science or some other ones that have emerged. So I think you've got a flawed model that you need to really think about.

I know that wasn't the answer you're looking for, but I feel like I got to be candid with you. Okay, Martin asks, I have a question about subscription pricing for a consumer service. My business is golf, stats, coach. Do you have any resources, insights, or methods about how to get the right price for a service? Okay, this is just basic testing, and I would look at comparable software out there. And what you'll find is, if it's a consumer product, you're in people's mind is already embedded $12 a month. month or $15 a month for my streaming service. Obviously, something like Disney Plus came out with a ridiculous introductory price of like $7. But the lowest cost that I think these services wind up

being is $5 a month, $60 a year. If something's $5 or $60 a year, people don't even think about it. It's just a snap purchase, right? Which is why Disney, I think, came out with that introductory pricing. That was ridiculously low. They didn't want people to think about it. Now you get to $10.20 a month. Let's just say $10 a month. We'll double the five. When you get to $10 a month at $99 a year, people need to get value from it or they're going to cancel because it starts to feel like, well, it's a hundy. It's $100.

You know, it feels more meaningful than just $5 a month. $10 a month feels annoying if you're getting hit every month. And that's one of the big secrets is you want to offer people the $5 a month or $8 a month pricing if they pay for the year. So you really want to lower the churn by having people pay yearly. If you do it every month, that means 12 charges a year. That means 12 chances for people to unsubscribe and churn, 12 cognitive moments that the consumer has to say, am I getting value from this or not?

It's much easier to pay for the year for Com or Stizi or a musician and say, you know what, I'll get to it at some point. I'll play that guitar at some point. And that's the much better approach. And, you know, in golf, you do get a little bit of a premium because, you know, people are going out there and spending $500 on a club or $300. hundred bucks on a club, whatever it is. And going out and playing golf is, you know, a couple hundred dollars every time you go out. So that's a pretty amazing group of people. So there are

some exceptions where if you're doing golf, if you're doing poker training or a poker app, you could charge more because there's more at stake. And so you'll just have to test it. And I think testing is the best way to test is to just copy other people's tests because they've already done them. So I would just look at what Calm is doing. I would look at what Steezy is doing. I would look at what FitBod is doing. I would look at musician. And I would go down the list of top subscription apps in the app store in iTunes. And I would just copy how they price things.

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Our next question comes from Tofer. What is a good shipping cadence for new code? How often should I push code to production and Reese new update, new updated versions of my app. Okay, it's a great question.

And I think there are people who have a lot of thoughts on this who are coders. I'm going to say from a consumer perspective, I'm going to take it just from the consumer perspective. People in a consumer app, if they get an update every two or three weeks, they feel like it's an improving product,

and I think they can have more faith in it. So in my Tesla, it used to be we'd get an update like every six months or a year back in the model S days. And they didn't happen that often, I think, maybe three months, six months. And then nowadays with my model three,

here we are, you know, in the second decade of Tesla's existing, we're getting over the air every couple of weeks, especially if I was self-driving one. And so it just feels amazing to get one every two or three weeks. I think that's the cadence. You wouldn't want to do it every two or three days.

That feels annoying. And then in terms of new features, I really like the idea of holding features back. If you have 10 features, instead of dropping three at a time and doing three drops on average, what you want to do is just drop one at a time, get feedback, educate people, and give them time to get up to speed on those. So when you drop too many things at once, you know, if you drop three or four updates at once, people are going to look at the one or two that are interesting to them and forget about the other two.

I love the cadence of superhuman. I love the cadence of Tesla. for some reason it just feels really good to me. And then how you communicate those updates is critically important. People do no longer manually update in their apps. So sending them an email saying, hey, we've updated com. You now have three more sleep stories and we added this, how to be more present in your everyday relationship,

how to be more present in your relationships at business and at home, this new course. Just giving those each 100% of the marketing message is critically important. I just love how when Raul sends a superhuman update, and you just subscribe to superhuman, and you'll get an idea of how to do this at a high level. They have a little icon on the top that tells you the updates, and you click on them, and you can see the messages there.

They also email you the message. So you get two swings at bat. You're not going to forget about it. You also get an update to the test flight. That also gives you the update on what's going on. So really spread it out and take your time explaining to it and take credit for those new updates with a blog post, with a video explaining it,

with an email, with an SMS update, with a notification, really let those things breathe those updates so consumers can grok them. Okay, Delane asks, when you started your first business, what were your strengths, weaknesses as a manager, leader? What was a young Jason like as a CEO and how is he involved into your current stuff? Okay, so that's a great question. I was a bit of a maniac when I was younger. People who worked for me at Silicon Allie Reporter probably have great stories of me, yelling at people, or going around the table and just chewing people out because their product wasn't good enough or just being generally really impossible to please.

Because I thought my job was to be the standard bearer and that if anything wasn't at a top level, it was my job to find out who didn't make it at that top level and then absolutely just grind on them until they got there, got on point, basically. And then when I realized, as I got older was some people are up for the test, some people are not, and I have to make a decision with the limited amount of energy I have, the limited amount of cycles, do I want to root for this

person and do I want to help them get better? If I don't want to root for the person, if they're too far behind, if their attitude is not the same as mine, and if they're not missionaries and they're not part of the missionary version of our team structure, in other words, they are not obsessed with the news and the truth and analysis, then they shouldn't be at inside. If they're not obsessed with startups, they shouldn't be a launch in this week and startups. I just try to get that alignment.

And when I find alignment, I just lean into working with that person. When somebody is resistant to learning, when they just don't bring it, they don't have the skills, I no longer feel the need that I have to go work with that person and push them. I just cut them. I'm just like a coach who's like,

you know what? You showed up late for practice. I told you to do a thousand free throws, you did 300, you're cut. That's it. That's the way I look at it. You know why? Because if I have a 15 person team, the top 12 players are so strong that if you're vying for one of those three introductory positions, you better bring it. And if you're not bringing it, well, then you're not serious about being here. So then don't be here. So I just run it in a very matter of fact way. I don't get up in people's grills. I don't push them hard anymore. Because what's the point? What's the point? If I got to push you, you're just, you should not. You should not. be in the Olympics. If you're, you should not be in the NBA, you should not be in the Navy SEALs, pick whatever pursuit it is. Now, if I was running a 10,000 person organization, I would have to have a different approach to my management style. I'd have to, you know, be a little more kumbaya and be a little bit more, you know, espri de corps. But I run an elite small team at both companies for a reason. I prefer to work with elite small teams and make big products that have a

big impact. So great question. And I think knowing yourself and why you're doing things is super important. In the early days, I just wanted to be rich, powerful, famous, and just not be a nobody. So, you know, that was the lens in which I looked through everything is how much power could accumulate. Now I'm looking at how good can I be at my job, certainly, but I'm not trying to accumulate power or wealth anymore. I'm trying to just be really good at my job and really enjoy going to work every day. I am self-aware enough to know that I'm really annoyed by average performers and low performers. Nothing, nothing is more demotivating or infuriating or annoying to me. I'll just use the word annoying. It's super annoying when I see people doing an average job. When I see people phoning it in,

when I see people not driven to have that Kaizan approach where they're constantly trying to be a little better every day. So that's what I look for. I look for people who want to be a little better every day. If you don't want to be a little better every day, please do not come work for me because I'm trying to be better every day. Great question. Okay. Mary asks me, in your early days, what was your leadership style towards people who were older, more experienced than you?

What advice would you give a young founder for hiring older experienced people? So I had Carol Mortesco, Elliott Cook, just a bunch of people who were older than me by 10 years probably when I was doing Silicon Allie reporter. And boy, did I, Joanne Wilson. And I look for them for advice. I look for them for counsel. I look for them to explain stuff to me. I would just say, hey, listen, I don't know anything about this.

Tell me everything. And I would just sit there and ask question after question after question. I think when you're young, you want to get those older folks around you and mean on them to explain what they've seen. But now you still got to make your own decision as the leader of the business. And I think anybody who is 10 years older and they want to work for somebody who's 10 years or 20 years younger than them knows, hey, there might be. be something special about this person. They might be a phenomenal entrepreneur, but they might have some things that need to be polished. And so it's a great combination of people go into it with eyes wide open, right? And so I think Carol Martesco and Elliott Cook and Joan Wilson and

some people who were, like I said, you know, maybe 10 years older than me, five to 10 years older than me, 15 years older than me, really did a great job of Mike Savino, about 15, 20 years older than me. They all did a great job of explaining to me why we did things the way we were doing them when I worked for them or they worked for me. Great question. Okay, Emily asks, is the worst of COVID past? What markets are you most bullish on post-COVID? Where do you think we will see the most innovation going forward? Great. So, Emily, I'm no doctor, but it's fairly clear that wearing a mask and social distancing absolutely works really well against COVID. And it probably works extremely well against just your normal colds that we'd have every cold season.

So hopefully people who have colds or feel a little tingle in their throat will keep wearing masks going forward. This macho, I don't have to wear a mask thing, is absolutely infuriating. you guys who will refuse to wear a mask are dopes, and that includes the president, anybody around him who thinks it's not macho to wear a mask. It's a requirement if you care about society and you care about people at risk, and you want to be a leader to wear that mask.

So in terms of spaces I'm most bullish on, and by the way, I think that we will see America, at least be okay with a certain amount of people getting COVID, a certain amount of people getting sick from COVID. And yes, tragically, a certain number of people dying from COVID to keep the economy moving forward because what we've seen is that without a livelihood, you're going to see massive damage psychologically, economically, spiritually, drug abuse, suicide, all these things are going to be correlated with people feeling hopeless and staying home all day. So we really, as a society, you're getting a quick education in what happens when 20% of people are unemployed,

when people don't feel that there's any hope, when children don't see their friends, when you stay at home this whole time. So there's a lot of fallout from this. And, you know, keeping people at risk, quarantined is obviously the right thing to do. And then letting young people make reasonable decisions about their future and taking reasonable risk is also in my mind, my opinion, not a doctor, my opinion as a civilian, is that people should be allowed to make those decisions for themselves. And listen, we're in America, and they are making those decisions for themselves. So whatever you think is the way we should handle this does not matter. We're in America.

And America is a free country where people are free to do stupid high-risk activities almost universally. I mean, you still have to wear a seat while you get a ticket. but if you really want to not wear your seatbelt and go 100 miles per hour, you can actually do it. You might get caught and get two tickets. Where do you think we'll see the most innovation going forward? I think, you know, it's easy to say remote and teamwork software. That's fine. I do think, and it's easy to say homeschooling, but the second people can get their kids out of their house and back to school, I think nine out of ten people will do it.

I do think that we're going to see people leave cities. And so there's going to be opportunities in cities having to overcome 10, 20 percent of people leaving. And there's going to be opportunities in managing 10, 20 percent of people going into the suburbs or even the country or infill, the area between the suburbs and the cities. So we're going to see just a lot of opportunities with that. I think telemedicine is a huge one. And remote conferences, remote get-togethers is something that I think has, a lot of promise. And I think the future of work being project-based, forget about working from home, but I also think project-based work is something that we're going to see go to another

level. So we already saw a lot of freelancers and Fiverr and those kind of products. But I think it goes to step function higher where you'll just see people say, you know what, I'm willing to do 10 hours a week for your company and 10 hours a week for this company. And then I'm going to ski, you know, the other two to the other four days of the week. Sounds pretty good to me. In uncertain time supporting your community and growing relationships with your customers will be appreciated, remembered, and share it. In good times and bad, open and empathetic communication with your customers is absolutely key. And email will always be the best channel for communicating with your customers. We all know that. You guys get emails from me all the time. Well, email marketing is one of

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Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Our next question is from Danielle. What are some high-level insights that you've personally gained since taking your team fully remote? What advice would you give to other founders, executives that are managing a fully remote team for the first time. Well, the number one thing I realized is, if we're going to go fully remote, then there are opportunities to find people outside of the, call it 30 miles around Silicon Valley. So we're no longer tied to people coming to an office.

Therefore, every position we should open up and think about, can this position be done from home? And the thing that's been really shocking to me is the accelerator. Our accelerator, the launch accelerator, which you can apply to at launch.co slash apply. We thought nobody would ever want to come to a virtual accelerator. And I think we were right about that that most people didn't want to. And so if you were serious about starting a company, you would come to Silicon Valley, even if it was just for 12 weeks, meet all the players here,

and then go back to Florida, Chicago, New York, wherever you happen to be. And I was fine with that. I think that was actually the best practice just in the last two or three years because San Francisco was too expensive. Now San Francisco rents are going to go down 10, 20, 30 percent, I believe. It's not going to crash to 40 or 50 percent. I don't think we're going to go from $4,000 apartments to two, but I do think we'll go from $3,000 apartments to $2,500 apartments, just as an example.

And that's actually good in terms of more people being able to come here. So when I questioned and I asked our existing graduates, hey, we're moving to a remote first accelerator. A bunch of them said, I would not have come. And then another group of them said, I've had a great experience doing that. So what I've come to conclude is there are two types of entrepreneurs, ones that want to come to Silicon Valley and be in the room with Sequoia or benchmark or craft. And they want to meet the top investors and they want to break bread with them and have a hamburger or go for a drink and really get to. to know them. And then there's a group of people who want to stay home. They have families in some cases. Maybe they're introverts. They don't want to travel. Whatever the reason is. And they are having

a wonderful time just popping on a Zoom three times a week. And they're getting a ton out of the accelerator. So long story short, we're going to move to a hybrid model where people will get to choose. And perhaps even our 19th class will be remote and our 20th will be in person. The 21st will be remote. 20 seconds will be in person, you know, even numbered cohorts on person, odd number one's remote. And it'll be the same deal for everybody. And then we'll let people come and go

between the two classes if they like. So that was the big realization for me is that hybrid is going to win the day. And being great at hybrid is the big win. And there is the other big realization I'm having when I just did a Google spreadsheet and I started looking at inside.com and launch and other companies.

if you look at the premium for what it costs to have somebody in Silicon Valley, I'll just give an example, a video editor, somebody to edit this very startup, the swing startups. You know, in San Francisco, they would cost literally double or triple, two and a half times even, what they might get paid in Los Angeles, Canada, Florida, Texas, etc. And then you put in work from home and, you know, people might be. be willing to take less if they work from home because they don't have to commute. And that little dance is going to occur in people's minds and that little mini-negotiations

is going to occur. So what I think is going to happen is the extreme salaries in the cities versus the low salaries overseas are going to create an equilibrium where there's going to be a new remote salary structure. And the remote salary structure will seem cheap if you were hiring people in New York and San Francisco, and it'll seem slightly more expensive if you were overseeing or over sending work overseas, but maybe just moderate. And that's going to change the whole dynamic, I believe, because there's some companies that are literally going to have two people in their dev shop or in

their design department or in their sales department for every one they had in Silicon Valley. And those people will not be lower quality because so many high quality people in my personal life are moving to Hawaii, to Tahoe, to Austin. I mean, I'm just watching it left and right. People are fleeing New York to go to upstate New York. And nobody wanted to be in upstate New York. I mean, upstate New York was so depressed. You could buy an acre of land for $1,000 or $2,000, an acre of land for low thousands of dollars. You can buy 10 acres for 50 grand. So we're seeing this entire thing flip over. And I think it's going to be wonderful because I have, I, think it leads us out of the recession. So let me explain my theory here. We're in a recession right now,

obviously. We are seeing a lot of jobs go away. Well, I think companies are going to let go of their least productive employees. When they see people's daily reports or they look at the output, they're going to just see that some people are not pulling their weight, whereas those managers would normally judge those people by their personality in the office and how long they were the office. Now they're going to just actually look at the work and make a decision. So it's going to be a little more cutthroat there and they're going to cut the bottom 10, 20 percent. Then they're going to see the, whoa, the top 10 or 20 percent are doing amazing. Let's find more people like them. But we're going to find those people anywhere in the world and they're going to cost 20 or 30 percent less.

And we're going to hire them twice as fast. And we're going to get rid of our office space and our facilities, which are 30 percent of our cost bases. So now you're going to see companies become twice as efficient as they go through this process of becoming hybrid or fully remote. And that could then make those companies so profitable that they start investing in advertising, in hiring, in job training, in marketing. And then you have the trickle down effect and the monetary velocity effect, which is the more money moves around, the better it is for everybody because you get taxes off of that money and you get spanned and it gets shifted around. So if I sit here on all of our money and don't do anything with it, that's not good for society. But if I hire two more,

writers, marketers, researchers for my business, and they go and spend money on marketing and advertising on some website or on podcasts. That's good for society. It's good for the economy. So I think it's going to be amazing. And as a founder executive, you got to just get really good at managing people remote, which is you need to know what they're working on. And you don't want to be a micromanager, but remote work requires a level of, I don't want to call it micromanaging, but micro monitoring maybe. I don't think you should have cameras on people all day, but there are some reasonable concessions. Like, if you're working, you need to be in the Slack room. You need to be available. You need to be in a quiet room. And we need to see your green light is on so

we can talk to you and you need to respond to us, not from your mobile phone, but from your desktop where you're working because you're getting paid to work. And it's not a vacation, remote from home. Remote work doesn't mean remote vacation or part-time work. Okay. So there's a lot of that stuff going on that I think managers need to work on. But I just see a huge opportunity for people to have more efficient companies to get more done and for people to lower their cost basis and enjoy their lives more. It might be much more enjoyable for somebody to not have a two-hour community every day, reclaim that time. If they reclaim two hours, maybe one hour goes to the company, one hour goes to them, maybe they take a lower salary, maybe they get more joy in their life.

There's going to be a whole negotiation around that. And you saw that with Zuckerberg talking about hey, if you leave San Francisco, that premium we paid you to move here is now gone. Your salary is going to get lowered. I mean, he's a cutthroat guy. And that's a level of cutthroatness that I didn't even anticipate that. You would think somebody worth $50 billion and be like, hey, if you move out of San Francisco, you know, we'll give you your salary for a year or we'll freeze your salary for two years if you go to a lower cost place. There might have been a better way to do it. But in fairness, Zuckerberg is lowering those people's salaries because if he doesn't and they move to Nashville, Then the person who lived in National who didn't get the extra 20K for a living in San Francisco

cost a living adjustment, well, they're going to be pretty bummed. You're going to say, oh, should I move to San Francisco, then leave? And then you'll give me a 20K bump. You get the idea. Great question. Danielle. And I'm still learning, to be honest. Matt asks, could you ever see an Uber and Lyft merger?

What would need to take place for that to happen? That will never happen because it would not make economic sense for either party and would not be allowed by regulators. It would be just seen as, I think in today's climate, as removing competition. You want to have a vibrant Uber and Lyft competition. And I think that's good for everybody. It's good for consumers. Now, you don't want to have 10 people competing, as we saw in micromobility, because it's a race to the bottom.

And we see that now with, you know, whatever, six or seven major players in delivery services, plus all the incumbents, plus plus, plus, or all the other software out there to let people do their own delivery services without using Uber Eats or DoorDash or Grubhub or PostMates. So I do think you need to see a little consolidation in those other areas so that those businesses become profitable

and sustainable and can pay a living wage to the people in their network. So we're never going to see that UberLift merger. I believe, just like we wouldn't see a Microsoft Apple merger and you will in all likelihood not see of Facebook and Twitter merger or acquisition anytime soon. Chris asks, would you rather invest in a high growth, high burn startup or a moderate growth minimal burn startup, assuming they had similar business models and markets?

How would you advise each company if they were both in your accelerator? Great question. I'm actually okay with both situations. I like the founder to do what they're comfortable with so they can go to work every day and be highly productive. And I trust the captain. I trust the person in the driver's seat. I don't want to be a backseat driver.

If the person who's flying the plane feels that they can go up to, you know, 34,000 feet and there's less turbulence there and then they got some clean air and they want to, you know, punch it and go a little faster, great. If they feel like, hey, you know what, they want to stay at 32,000 feet and they want to go a little slower and they feel more in control of the plane, I'm fine with that too. Why wouldn't I be? What I'm looking for is a company that gets to $50 to $100 million in revenue as a baseline, and I'm looking for a company that can return 50 to 100 times the money we invest in it.

So typically when we invest in a company, you know, we're investing at a $2 million valuation or so when they come to our accelerator, a $6 to $10 million valuation. When they graduate the accelerator, maybe a $10 to $20 million accelerator when they're doing some seed round before they get their serious end. in a Series A is typically 12 to 25 million these days. So we really don't care about that. That's not what's important to us. I think I would lean towards the high growth one because that's a sign of somebody who aggressively wants to win.

But if they were doing it in a stupid, non-considered way, then I would not feel good about it. So somebody who wants to drive 100 miles an hour on a windy road with the headlights turned off, no. But if they want to punch it, it. And in this analogy, you know, go a little bit faster than the speed limit on a straightaway. I'm all for it. Not in real life. Don't speed. Don't turn the headlights off. But in the startup world, I like a little speed. I like a little velocity. I think speed wins in a lot of cases. But you don't

ever want to go so fast that you start feeling the car wobble, right? You ever get that feeling the car start shaking, you're going a little too fast, or maybe you hear a tire screech a little bit on a turn or an exit ramp, bring it down, bring it down a little bit, okay, son? All right, great question. Another question from James, what software stack does launch use, which apps are integral to your team success and why?

What are the most impressive software apps right now, Slack, Notion, Zoom, etc. Obviously, we're big fans of Slack and Notion and Salesforce and, gosh, you know, we just use every piece of ZAS software you can imagine out there. Our sauna, Monday. We use it all. We love it all. I just am in love with the fact that software is so affordable and gets constantly better.

We use Squarespace. We're using SendGrid and Twilio. I mean, some of these are sponsors, past and present. Some of them have never been sponsors. But it's just a really great way to make your people bionic. What you need to do is look at all the stuff. software and make sure you don't get SaaS burnout in your organization where, you know, I think at one point we may have gotten up to like 14 SaaS products. And we looked at and said, you know what, let's cut these two or three because we can do that in this core piece of software.

So as an example, Google Docs is something we use. But we don't like Google Docs for doing what we do in Notion. Notion's so much better than just a dock here on the side that nobody has access to. So a lot of what we use Google Docs for it, we're out of. But we still love Google Sheets. We still love Airtable. So we're still using, you know, some select ones. And then I also like people to, you know, roll their own and spin their own and evaluate these things on their own.

So if somebody wants to use Airtable and my team and another person is in love with Google Sheets, I'll let them, you know, pursue their muse. And then eventually, you know, we'll pick one. Or if we not, we just let them use both because I care about results. If you happen to as a chef like a certain knife, and I happen to like a different brand of knife, in today's world, it's okay for us to use two different knives. In the old days, it would be like, oh, no, we have to be on this platform. As an example, we love Dell monitors.

I love Dell laptops and computers. I love using Chrome. I am off of MacOS because it's such a disaster and productivity killer. It's got so much croft. And machines are three or four times more expensive than Chrome machines and two times more expensive than Windows machines. So I've gone all in with Chrome, and I'm actually warming up to Windows again. And I got this Dell Chrome book, and it has all my ports back on it.

And I'm like, oh, my God, I got all my ports back. I have an Ethernet port in my laptop. I have a memory card in my laptop. I have a SIM card in my laptop. I've got a USBC and to regular USBs. I've got an HTML in my laptop. No more dongles. I'm back to having a Dell, and I love it.

So shout out to Dell and shout out to people rolling their own. And in our video department, we're now realizing we can buy two Dell machines for the price of an equivalent Apple machine. Or we can buy a machine that has twice as much memory and twice as much storage and 25% more CPU power than what we would pay for that insane Mac Pro. Not the MacBook Pro, but the Mac Pro Tower. Why would you ever buy that when you could buy a Dell that? that's just souped up with a ton of memory. Makes no sense. So I think you have to look at the bottom line as well.

And negotiate with your stats providers too, because they will play ball if it's too expensive. Great question.