This Week in Startups - E1083 News: Trump considers TikTok ban, Twitter leaks subscription platform, Clubhouse drama, Harvard price gouging & more with Morgan DeBaun & Alex Wilhelm

Episode Date: July 9, 2020

Follow Alex: https://twitter.com/alex Follow Morgan: https://twitter.com/morgandebaun Check out Blavity: https://blavity.com/ Follow Jason: https://twitter.com/Jason https://linktr.ee/calacanis

This week in startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters. Get a $50 credit towards your first job post at LinkedIn.com slash twist. Mero is an online whiteboard that brings teams together anytime, anywhere. Go to Miro.com slash twist to sign up for a free account with unlimited team members and Dell for entrepreneurs. Level up your hardware today and save up to 55% by going to Dell.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome to this week in startups.

I'm your host, Jason Calcanus is the show. We're talking about technology, startups, entrepreneurship, capitalism, the good, the bad, the ugly. And it's been a crazy week here in the Silicon Valley, in the United States and the world. Obviously, we're still in the middle of the pandemic. Thankfully, every country seems to have figured this out, except for our great country, America,

where we will try every strategy that doesn't work before doing the very simple act of putting on a 72-cent mask. With me today to discuss all the tech news. Alex Wilhelm is back on the program. You know him. He's the senior editor at TechCrunch, formerly the editor-in-chief of Crunch-based News, where I've been updating my profile.

I forgot to update my profile. And now I've got over 200 investments and I was realizing I was low in the rankings, Alex. But I may need your help getting a couple of investments on that. I know the back end a little bit and I can help out. But mostly it's just typing. So I think you are on the path. You can do it.

I believe in you. You can get it done. I will get it done. You're from an undisclosed location in the Northeast corridor. I don't know if you tell people where you are. Yeah, Providence, Rhode Island. I'm a new East Coast transplant, eight years in other. stuff before this.

Muesco's kidd originally, but I'm learning how to wear boat shoes. So it's been an enormous cultural revolution. Yeah, and my condolence is, of course, on Brooks Brothers. So I'm very sorry. You leave San Francisco. You move to the northeast and Brooks Brothers goes down in flames. I'm doing God's work. I mean, everyone should thank me.

I rolled out here. It died. I mean, cause and effect. Those parachute shirts, God, almighty, they look terrible. But interestingly enough, you leave San Francisco, this place, when you want to talk about falling apart, oh, my Lord. place is a ghost town now and the homeless problem has now gone supernova and every company is leaving. Alex, you know, remember traffic in Soma?

Oh, viscerally. There is none. There is none. None. Like getting onto the 80, there might be five cars backed up. And it used to be five blocks of cars. It would take 40 minutes to get onto the 80 to go into Oakland and Berkeley over the Bay Bridge. Now it's zip, zip, zip.

It looks like it's a Saturday on Tuesday. It's bizarre. I'm also annoyed that right after I left, rents went down. We were just talking before the show about, you know, housing prices around the California area. But, like, I was getting just, you know, blith through the nose for years in SF. And now I leave and everything on discount. The official number is 12% lower rents this year versus last year, I think, according to Zumper's data. But what I'm hearing from folks who are actually renegotiating their rents because people are like, hey, I'm leaving.

And the actual offers are now 20% off rent. That's the standard request. So if you had a 40, people here would, they would have $3,500, $4,500 for one to two bedroom, whatever, some modest place. You know, it's basically going back down to $3,000, $3,500. Maybe getting back towards the New York rent. Morgan DeBond is with us. She, I guess I interviewed you.

I don't know if you've, have you done a news roundtable, Morgan? No, I haven't. So thanks for doing it. Everybody knows that you're the CEO and founder of Blavity, which is doing fantastic. I know because I follow your Insta and everything. Tell everybody about the business, how you make money. I know you started it, I think, back in 2014 or so, 2015. Yeah, 2014, about six years ago in a couple weeks. Sublovities of media, news organization, and platform, and mostly a community that focuses on the black millennial and now Gen Z

audience and community in the United States. So it's a busy, busy season for us. Also a pandemic for media companies not very good on your bottom line. So it's brutal, right? Advertising just got turned off. Did it go down half or 50%? Yeah, it's been brutal. I was like 30% and then we kind of got a second wave because everyone stopped campaigns out of respect.

Oh my God. But then I was like, that's not good for our revenues. So it's been an interesting couple weeks. I think it's definitely bouncing back more recently, yeah. Yeah, and that's counterintuitive. you would think that people would want to be supportive of black culture during the protests and, you know, during this horrible time. But a lot of, I think, advertisers don't know how to deal with. They don't know what to say, right?

Like, are we supposed to say we're with you? You know, what is their, what's the best approach for brands during something like the civil unrest and the protests and, you know, this, you know, horrible murder. And I think it's pretty clearly a murder of George Floyd. Yeah, you know, I think the first phase was, okay, we have to say something. Like, so everyone get their statements together. And then the second phase was, right, words don't actually mean anything. We should probably do something, right? And so then it became, okay, what should we do?

Everyone started to look internal first. So that's where a lot of, you know, black employees felt very empowered to hold people accountable, which was a really amazing moment for a lot of people to have their voices heard for the first time. in some of these huge corporations. And then it was, okay, what do we do for our customers? You know, many of these just big companies, black people shop there or, you know, featuring their business. And it's like, oh, man, do we know this?

Are we paying attention to these people? How are we serving them? How are we serving their community? And then, you know, I think we've seen a lot of the $100 million commitment come out in the last couple weeks. So now I think we're entering the phase of, okay, we're going to make a $10 million, you know, commitment for the next 10 million. years or we're going to build out a program or whatever it may be inside the company to

be more explicit. We'll see what that looks like as they start to roll out and there's accountability in groups and where the money actually lands. Still TBD on what that looks like. And I guess it's easy to be sort of cynical and say these folks are, you know, just doing some you know, minor thing and it's window dressing or a facade. Do you think they're actually making real change that you think is important? And if not, what is the real change that people need to make? Well, I think that there's a couple of things. For the corporations, I definitely believe there's a handful of people who are just reallocating budgets they already had and calling it, putting a bow on it and calling it something. Right. Please give me a cookie. Yeah. I just moved from here to here.

Right. So it's like you're already spending $10 million, you know, in black advertising. And now you're just explicitly saying that and making it a PR statement, great, but also not actually great. And then I think the thing that is happening on the consumer side is just as human beings, I do think that there's more general awareness of white people of like, oh, snap, I'm kind of racist. Like, didn't need to be. Didn't think I was, but actually I'm kind of biased. Maybe I'm a little bit racist. I was like, I've had a lot of conversations and people that are, you know, I consider advisors or friends.

And I have a little bit more space now to say, hey, no, you're not intending to do this, but just want to know you to know that statement you just made was actually biased. I had this moment, you know, I don't know if you have the three or four, Alex, you know, as well, you know, threads that you've had going with your friends and I message or whatever, what's that, whatever you use to get you through. COVID to get through all the civil arrests and the protests. And one of them, one of my friends who's white, said, oh my lord, the world has gone mad

and posted a video of a militia of people walking down the street in guns. And he's like, this has gone too far. And it was a militia of black people. And I was like, oh, that's racist. Because

the militia of white people, literally everywhere in America. I'm like, did you miss the 10,000 overweight 300 pound cosplaying dipshits with their AR-17s that look

like they're so tiny because their beer guts are so huge. And these guys literally couldn't even walk up the stairs to, you know, be in the Marines. They're that obese and dumb. And my friend's like, oh my God, now it's an and we have on the thread, it's just a

much of my friends in New York, there are different people of different colors. And that became an interesting thread for the day. I will say that. Yeah, these are conversations. I don't think that this generation of people have had. You know, I think this is the conversation our parents probably were having at some point. But my friends and I, you know, I have white friends, green friends, yellow friends. I got all the types of friends. We have never talked about race at this level of honesty, ever. Yeah. Which is good. I mean, sometimes, you know, it's like my wife tells me. me sometimes you got to go through it to get there. You know, you have to like go through the hard stuff in order to get to the good stuff.

You're going to have like these hard conversations. What's your experience, Alex? Yeah. My family group has been very interesting about this because my family goes from ages like 75 down to like 12. And so you have an enormous gamut of people from different countries and people from the United States and so forth. And I have been surprised at how constructive it's been and how much of the stuff was discussed. What I also learned in some other conversations was how poorly informed some people are, people not even knowing how to pronounce the word like Antifa, because they don't get about anti-fascism.

I've heard it pronounce Antifa. And if you realize that some people are starting from nowhere. And that's disappointing and not great. But you do also, or at least I found constructive conversations, honest intent, and people trying to move towards not just being race neutral, but to be anti-racist, which I think is the important step that we're now talking about in shows like this. and around all social media and out in the streets. And it's a very positive change for the country.

And I'm a little bit optimistic, which is a nice feeling to have this year. Are you optimistic, Morgan? You think this is making progress? I'm cautiously optimistic. I think this accelerated some version of progress within our generation. I'm very optimistic about the youth. Like, I'm super optimistic about kids in college right now in high school.

I'm like, oh, you guys got it. You know? They're getting it right. and, you know, they, it's, it's really interesting because they, the interesting thing, and it relates to our next story, which is TikTok, which is I think that putting millennials aside, this Gen Z, which I think comes after it, I have a feeling that this is the generation that not only is aware of these things, but I think they got strategies and they want to like actually take over. And what they did to Trump on TikTok and embarrassing. him and making him think that he had a million people sign up for that stupid rally and then like 6,000 people showed up. They made him look so dumb. It was the ultimate trolling. When we get back from this quick break, I want to talk about the Trump administration, which has all of a sudden seen the light of day, which I've been talking about for months, that they want to

suddenly ban TikTok because there's a Chinese app and maybe it's spyware. And I've been talking about, hey, the dangers of that. But interestingly, they suddenly care about maybe banning TikTok the week after TikTok makes them look really dumb when we get back on This Week in Starves. Listen, you all know LinkedIn Jobs is amazing, but I wanted to start today's ad read with an amazing story from one of our founders in the This Weekend Startups community. Now, this is a true story. I talked to the fella, and he had an amazing experience. He's a listener of the show. His name is Aaron Mason, and he is the founder and CEO of a company called Emma A.I. He's in the AI business. You all know how hard it is to find somebody in the AI space,

a lot of competition. Well, he just hired a machine learning engineer. They started this Monday. I'm not kidding you. This is a true story. He received 110 relevant applications, not like drive-by resume. It's not that nonsense. Relevant. Not people who want you to teach him AI in machine learning, people who know how to do it. And he got all those in only four days with a smaller budget than he had ever used before. And he got so much amazing value from LinkedIn jobs, thanks to our partnership with LinkedIn here on this week in startups. And that just makes me feel great because you know what it's like when you're a founder.

You're just struggling and struggling. And then you find the right person. And it's like a rocket ship. And LinkedIn Jobs is that rocket ship. It's the fuel that's going to propel your startup to the next level, small businesses have very unique needs. You know that. And despite all this uncertainty, you've got to get the right people on the bus and then you get the bus going in the right direction. If your business is ready to take it to the next level and you need that jet fuel to get you to escape velocity, LinkedIn jobs can help by matching your role with qualified candidates so that you find the right person quickly, just like Aaron did. Can you imagine getting 110 qualified candidates in four days? It's magic. It is the most. active community of professionals. They've got 690 million right now, so the billion's coming. Let J-Cal give you the $50 off right now. Go to LinkedIn.com slash twist.

LinkedIn.com slash T-W-I-S-T. This weekend start-ups. You get it. That's our little, that's our little code there. LinkedIn.com slash twist to get the Fitty, get your 50 right now. $50 off your first job post. Now, terms and conditions do apply because they're giving the 50 bucks. So don't play any games. Get that 50 and solve your problem. right now. All right. Let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, welcome back to the pod. Morgan DeBahn is with us. If you don't know, Blah, that he follow it. Insta,

sign up for the website. And Alex Wilhelm is with us. He is a senior editor of a tech crunch. And we're talking about TikTok. Just, you know, somewhat breaking news. The Trump administration considers banning TikTok and other

Chinese social media apps as India has banned 50 plus Chinese apps. And they're in a little bit of a skirmish on the border there. The FTC and the Justice Department are looking into allegations that TikTok failed to delete accounts for children under 13, violating a 2019 agreement. And last week, India banned these 59 apps. And that ban could lose by dance $6 billion in revenue.

Mike Pompeo, when he talked about banning Chinese apps said, especially TikTok. And the quote was, I don't want to get out in front of. the president, but it's something we're looking at. TikTok is owned by BightDance, and it's been accused of being a security threat because obviously it's got ties to China. If you're on a business in China, you're in business with the CCP, which stands for the Chinese Communist Party. You know, TikTok, of course, claims they operate separately from BightDance and the data centers are located out of China and that it's not subject to Chinese law, which is absolutely ridiculous. They had 315 million downloads in the first quarter of 2020, which is extraordinary.

Their past 2 billion downloads, they had the most quarterly downloads of any app, according to Censor Tower Analytics. 60% of the users are between the age of 16 and 24. And bizarrely, the former head of Disney Plus, Kevin Mayer, was named the CEO. I don't know why an American would become the CEO of a company from a communist country that seems insane. But the inside scoop is that he felt he should have been the CEO of Disney. So he took this job, which excuse me, I'm sure he is regretting at this point. Alex, any thoughts on this story? And then Morgan, I'll get yours.

Normally, when I come on this show, I have like one strong opinion about things. In this case, I'm a little bit torn. One, I agree with your notes about Chinese companies in the CCP and how that government runs the country and how it has eyes into everything that happens commercially because that's how you censor and kind of run that information control in the entire country. On the other hand, China has banned so many U.S. services over the years. I'm hesitant to begin to follow suit. I wonder if there's a middle path here that involves looking into the possible data breach, fines, restrictions, doubling down on data segregation between different countries. and finding some sort of middle ground and not just following suit between a putatively communist country and an increasingly nationalistic India. It doesn't seem to be the approach that I like.

And also I don't like Mike Pompeo, the personal bias there. Yeah, I mean, that is part of the challenge of this is, you know, the Trump administration might have a reason for doing this. That might have more to do with Morgan, to your point, this next generation, which is using TikTok. So now we've got this very multi-layered nuanced issue. Do we not with young people love this platform? Well, I guess my question is really what's the responsibility of Apple and Google for the information that's passed through? I mean, to me, that seems like something more in our control as companies that are actually headquartered here in the United States. Yeah.

And they led it into the app stores. Of course, you know, what percentage of the users actually know it's a chance? Chinese app? Not many. Nobody. Like, or very few. No way. The average girl running around dancing, she has no idea that this is owned.

What if we did TikToks about how TikTok is owned by bite dance? What if we use the platform to spread awareness of the issue? They don't know what bite dance is. Right. I wonder, actually, this would be an interesting test. If we did, I'm going to, okay, listen, I got a lot of followers. This is a message to my followers, you know, those 3% of you who are just, you know, Very enthusiastic, let's say.

One of my enthusiastic followers, please run a couple of experiments for me. I would like you to run a series of TikToks featuring Tiananmen Square and the history of Tiananmen Square. And let's see how long it lasts. And then I would like you to inspire everybody to use the hashtag Tiananmen Square

or remember Tiananmen Square. And let's see if we can trend it. And to producer Nick and Sir Charles, can we clip this? And let's see if we can trend Tiananmen Square on TikTok. and let's put some music behind it, and let's make a really powerful, impactful, trending Tiananmen Square,

and then we'll find out exactly who's running TikTok. How does that sound, everybody? A reasonable test. I'm with it. I'll retweet. I think my trolling skills just went to 11. And also, you're never going to China now. You're just never going to go back.

You know what, actually, I've been so critical, Alex. It's interesting. You mentioned that my book got translated into Chinese. It's right over here behind my head, on this side. and I went to Hong Kong and I told my friend Mike Savina who was with me when I was on book tour there

I said you know I'm not going to mainly in China because I've been a bit critical and I'm a little concerned about my safety because I don't want to be that schmuck who's like the first American who gets picked up and that was during the Huawei stuff when Canada had picked up the daughter of the CEO

and whatever is some ugliness going on with that and I was like and now I just I did a speaking gig last night in Hong Kong remote and I was like I don't think I can go to Hong Kong no not with a new law yeah i guess that's all for me yeah kind of a bummer i you know if you had to choose um allow ticot knowing the chinese government had access to the data let's just assume that that is 100% certain they have the keys to the kingdom we know alice they have the keys to the kingdom should putting your you know obvious feelings about trump aside and my feelings and i'm going to

assume Morgan's. Putting aside the Trump administration, let's just pretend it was in the Obama administration or the Kanye administration in six months, should we ban TikTok if we knew the government had access to it, yes or no, Alex? I'm going to answer that in the annoying way of not giving you one word answer. Here's a similar question.

Somebody still wants to go to Shanghai. No, no, I'm good. I mean, Shanghai was lovely, but I'm not going to go back until the government's different. The NSA is graph. onto AT&T and the fiber of the American Internet. It's kind of a generally accepted statement. Yep.

And they can just yank in all the data from the American Internet, let alone any particular app. And then they have a warrant to get inside of it. You know, again, how much faith do you have in those little legal defenses they set up? I think the Snowden League showed us they were much more adventurous than they claimed to be. Sure. Should Europe ban American apps that are too close to the U.S. government or the companies that own them are too close to the U.S. government? I would say no to that. I would hope the answer is no.

The question then becomes, is the Chinese government in such a large risk that this is required? And I think that my views have changed since the implementation of the recent security law in Hong Kong. I think now given that, and their rules that go pan-global, I think the answer is probably yes. And my friends love TikTok.

They send me TikToks all the time. I laugh at them. It's lovely. I just deleted that myself. But probably is the best I can get on that, Jason. Sorry for being. Morgan, where do you stand on it? if we knew that they were looking at it.

It depends on who I'm solving for. You know, I think if I'm solving for like being an American and democracy, etc., then yes. If I think that the country in America and the government really protects us, me, my people, which I don't believe right now. So then I say, no, give the people what they want. And it's the responsibility of the people we pay with our taxes to keep us safe. even figure it out.

And young people are probably freaking out right now. To entrepreneurs, man, if you thought you wanted to create a competitor, now would be a great time to do it because I'm going to put the odds at 80%. And by the way,

the other thing that I thought was interesting, and I don't know if you heard this stuff, Morgan, was that the folks at TikTok were not picking black people to be featured as dancers and were picking white. people and skinny people.

It's bad. It was kind of gnarly. I mean, I'm going to look at it now. Certainly, a lot of companies have been called out recently and a lot of people are looking like that. Lizzo called out TikTok a while ago for kind of like the fat show. The algorithm?

Yeah, the algorithm, right? So, but the algorithm forever. I mean, Twitter, I love Twitter. I love Jack Dorsey. Twitter absolutely surprised black voices back in the day. I don't know if you ever remember. Like people used to trend like every night. Absolutely. You and I talked about, I think, on the pod was like there was actually, I heard the internal discussion about this, which was people are confused by Black Twitter because you keep trending stuff that we don't understand. And so we're like, can somebody explain to me why the top 10 things are, you know, words I don't know. And it's like, well, you're going to know them in about three to six months because Black culture is culture. Like, let's be honest.

But there was a time when that was always trend, stuff was always trending. at like six o'clock, late night Twitter. And then it's all of a sudden, we stopped trending. How? Not because we stopped talking. It's because they localized it. They localized it, and then they made it part of who you follow. So they did the whole echo chamber thing.

Okay, working remotely doesn't mean you need to feel disconnected from your team. You're going to need to use new tools, and one of them is called M-I-R-O. M-I-R-O. but Miro is an online whiteboard that brings together teams anytime, anywhere, because we're all working from home right now and we're all working from around the world. So imagine you had this perfect, infinite canvas where you could brainstorm, make mockups and designs, maybe organize files, manage complex projects like making an app or a SaaS product or a conference, any of these things. Well, you just pick one of the great templates at Mero and you're off to the races. And here is my amazing presh. He whiteboarded all the operations of what we needed to do for Angel University.

And we all sat there and we were just amazed. Amazed at how quickly and crisply we were able to design the perfect workflow and project management for Angel University, which is doing incredible marketing, operations, content. You know, we had to have this workflow all designed and we had to assign who was going to work on. We had to put all the files in the same place. So nobody would miss a beat. And that's what Miro helps you do. I want you to go to MIRO.com slash twist, and you sign up and you're going to get a free account with unlimited team members.

They love startups. They want to see you be successful. They know it's a challenging time right now. And they know they have the perfect product for remote teams. And it's so great to get that whiteboarding session back. I can tell you it's a game changer. Go in there. Miro.com slash twist.

Speaking of the echo chamber and the absolute cesspool that Twitter has turned into. and boy did I have a crazy week on this platform. Twitter is now working. Oh, God. Well, I mean, if you could talk about and get into it. Twitter is working on a new subscription-based platform code named Grif, Gryphon, Griffin? And Griffin, yeah. And I had talked about this a while ago.

I said, they just pay $100 a year and let everybody be verified or five bucks a month. And they'd have a great revenue stream. And then you could just click a button and say, I only want to see people who pay. and anybody else will just be grayed out or, you know, I could filter them out, just like the quality filter. To where Wednesday morning Twitter posted a job listing revealing their building a new internal team code name Griffin. That is building a subscription platform. And this is just like the easiest layup for Alex and journalists. Like, do you not think journalists are reading your job descriptions?

Oh my Lord. That's just like the easiest hack in the world, right, Alex? Yep. I mean, when I saw this, I was like, come on, guys. Come on, guys. Come on. You can't announce your secret project in a thing we're going to go read. Like, come on, we're going to see this.

For test drivers and self-driving. It's like, for a special project, that is not a self-driving car. And the popular theory is right now that it's a Twitch Patreon-style subscription, which would be quite nice, actually. So you can subscribe to individual accounts. And that would be amazing for people to be able to monetize themselves. I talked to Evan Williams about that a decade. ago.

Or power users could pay for access to new analytics, breaking news alerts, stuff like that. Twitter share price jumped 12%, which is pretty amazing since people have kind of lost face in that company ever breaking out against the Goliath. What would, I guess the first question, Alex, would you pay for Twitter? And if you would pay for Twitter, what features? top three in ranked order would you want to pay for? It's a great question. One, absolutely.

I've been on Twitter since 2007, 2008, and I still use it as much as I did 10 years ago, which is a shocking thing to say out loud, but I'm still as attached to it. So whatever they want to charge me, I would have to pay because I can't not have it. So they could charge me an infinite amount of money. I would just go broke because I'd have to give it to them.

Things that I would love, I would love to be able to support individual publications and bands on Twitter. I think it would be really fun to be able to follow, say, you know, Blavity or T.C. or whatever, or a band that I love that's smaller and be able to give them some money on a recurring basis. It'd be fun to have that mechanism.

Yeah. I would love to pay to Nazi advertisements. I'm always willing to do that. Wait, are you verified? Do you see ads? I don't see ads. It spikes, though, right, guys? I mean, like, because sometimes there's no ads.

They're promoted tweets when you go to a feed. Yeah, but I assume Morgan, are you verified? You got blue check mark? Yeah, I'm verified. Yeah, we're all, well, Team Verified, but in the beginning, Team Verify didn't see any ads. That was their concept. Yeah, they're like, no, we've got to charge those guys.

Yeah, they're like, wait a second. It was great until they realized that's where all their monies. Yeah. Well, now we see them in big bursts before earnings, I feel. So that's what happens on that. So get rid of ads. And then a last thing, I don't know. Those are the only two things that I want.

I would pay money to not have an edit button for everyone else to get spicy about that. Ooh. Morgan, what do you got? Would you pay for it? I would have to pay for it on the business side. it's critical for black news and real stories and truth-telling. On the personal level, as a personal brand, I hate Twitter. I feel constantly attacked and it is not a positive place anymore for me.

What is the nature of a black woman on Twitter? What do you experience? you know, I I used to tweet a lot and now I have the fear that at one point when I was 21 years old you know,

tipsy in college tweeted something silly and that people are going to go back and do the whole cancel thing you know and I'll be like yeah she was done but that was 10 years ago yeah you know

and then and I wasn't a public figure Right. I was just me, my 200 followers. So, you know, I have definitely tried to go back and like delete archive, just make sure, luckily I didn't have anything bad to delete. But I just worry about the trolls and the people were just angry and sitting on their couch, just sitting there with nothing to do. But all they have to do is tweet some provocative stuff, some provocative hashtag. And all of a sudden it just spins into this little weird site.

of mean and toxicity. It's pretty crazy and toxic. I guess the next question I have for each of you is I'm going to propose a price. Let's assume there's a free tier and you get almost everything. But, you know, there's some premium features. $50, $100, I'm sorry, $5 a month, $10 a month, $15 a month. Which price do you think they're going to go with if you had to pick one? Netflix price, $10 a month.

Okay. I think that's right. But I just realized I have an idea about why they're doing this, Jason. You've been tracking SaaS stocks, I presume like everyone else has been because software prices have gone through the roof. Twitter is an ad business and everyone doesn't love an ad business if it's not Google or Facebook. So I bet Twitter just wants some gosh darn recurring revenue and that's going to juice their valuation nicely. So from a financial perspective, it's smart. But I would pay 15 or 1,500 if they demanded me to pay it because I can't not have it. You're a super user, though. Absolutely. I'm guilty as charged. I mean, I don't feel great about this, but I'm trying to be as honest as I can be on the show. I'm not particularly cool and I do tweet too much. So this is my world. I hang out with my collection of weird goofball friends. So yeah, I think the analytics part and some of the premium features that you use third party for. So the feature I've been asking them for is archive. So, you know, on on Instagram you can archive your old stuff. I also archived my entire Facebook. I had to use a third party tool. It was like a, a,

a Chrome extension. I just literally archived everything because I don't like to use it and I don't want people bring up pictures of my kids and stuff like that. And you know, you guys,

we've all went from kind of obscure figures 10, 15 years ago to now being, you know, you know, more notable. And so you do get a little bit

of security concerns or also, you know, the way people use Twitter was, it was almost like a chat room. People forget that. Like,

people were tweeting hundreds of times a day and they were just responding to, each other as if it was a chat room. And so you can find chats that were like, yes. And okay, sure. You know, and it's like, what? What's this relation to? So I archive my whole thing, but I, you can't archive. So I just used some, there's some tweet deleting tool for this 10 bucks a month. And so I downloaded my archive and then I deleted everything. And so now I just have my last

two years or something. Oh, that's great. Yeah, it's kind of cool. You can just type in tweet, tweet to leader. And then there are some people now who just say every thousand tweets, just keep the last thousand or just keep the last hundred days, whatever it is. It's like your iMessages. It's the I message does that? You're saying? Yeah, I didn't know that feature exists. So anyway, it's kind of a cool thing. And that's what I would pay for. Also the analytics, you know, people pay for buffer or analytics, tweet deck, all that stuff that businesses use. Man, there's so many great things they could use. And we were investors in a company called Get Little Bird that got sold.

And they did a very interesting thing, which was like they would create Twitter lists automatically. So you'd say, hey, you know, give me everybody in, you know, involved in sushi in sushi restaurants. And you'd say, okay, give me 10 sushi related Twitter candles. And then it would go out and do the cross-referencing and say, who do these handles, following common? Okay, that's the second degree. You know, kind of do a bit of page ranking. And there's so many amazing ideas there. that would be absolutely fantastic.

When we get back from this quick break, Harvard is charging. I kid you not. Full tuition next year, despite being fully virtual. I'm going to discuss it here on this weekend startups in just about 60 seconds. Hey, everybody, you need to upgrade that workstation.

I know you want to. And I have just upgraded. I've got this beautiful Dell with all of these ports. I got my ports back. and I got a machine that doesn't crash that's rock solid and it's affordable. I could buy two or three of these for the price that we're paying for some of those other overpriced ones with no ports. And I got an Ethernet port and I got an HDMI port and I got a SIM card I can put in there. Dell for Entrepreneurs wants to help you upgrade all your tech hardware and they're going to make everything so easy for you.

You're not going to believe how great the offer is. Scaling your company, you know that means more than just hiring. it means getting high quality laptops, high quality networking equipment, storage printers, all that stuff, so your employees have the tools they need to succeed. And the number one thing that people forget is the monitors. It's so beautiful those Dell monitors.

And listen, I use them for the office here and on the set. We've got them everywhere. And with Dell Financial Services, qualified founders, which you're going to be qualified if you're listening to this podcast for sure, can finance their entire hardware project and pay for it in low monthly payments. So you're going to get a better price,

a better product and you can get to pay it back over time. And founders can earn cash rewards like up to 6% cash back. They can help you with your laptop and desktop computers, cloud strategy servers, Microsoft licensing, all that important stuff, the blocking and tackling IT stuff. Twist listeners can get up to 50% off until July 22nd and take an extra 5% off by going to Dell.com slash twist. Dell.com, very easy, you know that, slash twist. That's our little hashtag there.

IST. This means you can get up to 55% off select products at Dell.com slash twist, and you're only going to get it if you go to Dell.com slash twist one more time, 55%. Thank you, Dell. I love all the hardware I buy from y'all. It's just great stuff. Hey, everybody, welcome back. Morgan and Alex are with us. Alex is, are you at Alex on Twitter? You got the first name? Morgan, what's your Twitter? At Morgan, Devon. I'm not as cool. Someone has at Morgan. I don't know who she is. we should find her and figure it out. Let's docks her. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, don't do that.

Just ask her nicely. Give her $1,000. Actually, you can't buy and sell Twitter handles. Anymore. Right. Well, I don't think you ever could, but the way you do it is, I could hire you as a consultant and throw in the handle. I bought mine in 2008, I think. $500?

That was a long time ago. It was all the money I had, which was. $60. I was living on my sister's couch in Palo Alto. I think right now, I believe you get $25,000 for it right now easily. Oh, yeah, for sure. I get offered for at Jason on Instagram. I get at least 100 people a week asking for it.

Which I don't, doesn't make much sense to me because it's not like the ad handles on Instagram actually make much sense. But did you want to add something to the conversation about Twitter when we went to break? I think Alexi kind of raised. Yeah. I had an idea. We were talking about analytics and

buffer and all this. And I was just thinking that, you know, what Twitter could do is go out and buy one of the services that are actually plugged into the social media world and bring all that already built ARR into their house. They could go buy Sprout social for not that much money compared to how much, you know, they're worth today. And they could just bring in a ARR SaaS machine into their business. And then instantly, their hybrid payments, ads and software business. Yeah, Wall Street looks at it totally differently. And they could just go on a complete tear because their evaluation would go up. Every time they bought one of those, if they bought it for $100 million, their valuation would go up $300 million, and then they have more currency, and they could just start the whole train, and stonks

go up. Stonks have been going up. Stonks go up. Didn't they buy tweet deck already, though? They bought tweet deck, they bought Someeyes, which was the original search engine. Basically, people don't remember the history of Twitter. Twitter had absolutely no technical ability to do anything. They were bloggers, right, and they were really, you know, web designers, but they didn't know how to use a database. So the thing was crashing constantly. So they couldn't even build a search engine, image hosting, or a client. So you used a third-party client in the app store, a third-party client on your desktop, surmise to search it, and tweet pick and tweet vid and long tweet. Long tweet, yeah. There were like dozens of these little apps built around it. I think access to

the API too. Remember, NIP? Was it NIP? And then there was another one. There were two. two folks, data sift was the other one. There were two... There were different APIs. There was Sprinkler and there was the fire host, which was all the tweets, which was hard to get your hands on. I think Y Combinator had the fire host

and that was an advantage of like Y Combinator's drops. Remember when like tech was really small and you could like know all eight people? That was a cool time. So weird. Well, I mean, if you want to know exactly how weird it was, when it got to about 100,000 people on Twitter, number one was Robert Schoble with like 30,000.

I was number two at 20,000. And then this like, I don't know, nobody presidential candidate Obama was like 15,000. And then overnight, Obama had a million. And if you look, Obama follows me in like

500,000 people. Because the, which is insane, right? You're like, why does Obama follow people? What happened was, in the early days, I asked Ev, or Biz, listen, it's getting really tiresome

for me to follow people back. Can you just put a checkbox so I just automatically followed people back because the tradition in the early days was you just reciprocated. You follow me. I follow you. And they're like, yeah, sure, we can add that. So they added it. So I checked it off. Scoble checked it off. And so did Obama. And we all just followed everybody back. And then I was like, you know what? This could be something. So I just told one of my interns at the time, can you do me a favor? Here's the login. Just follow 100 people a day or 200 people a day. Because that's how many people were signing up. So I said, just follow everybody. It was pretty funny, actually.

The original growth hacker. It was a growth hacking technique. This weekend, I literally, unfollowed everybody. And I put my account on private because it got so heated. My debate, there was a debate about journalism, which I'm sure you followed Alex, I got out of control. And I got docs for the first time of my life. And so now I know what it's like to be a woman or a person of color or a transgender person. I literally had some maniac who was 37 years old, worked in private equity, had a family on July 4th, post my address under a tweet, and he said, you disagreed with, I wouldn't say the journalist's name at the New York Times, about something. Therefore, how does it feel?

And I was like, are you crazy? So I called him on the phone. I don't know. I should I tell the story or not, Alex. How do you have his phone number? Well, he follows me and has for some time. You watch this whole thing go down, this disgusting, crazy battle? Oh, I was all over this.

I don't think you and I are on the same side of this, but I want to point out that I just pulled up your page and you don't follow me on Twitter back yet. I will follow you back. I literally unfollowed everybody because I was a little concerned. I didn't know the extent of are they going to go after family members or other people who are non-public figures. So I'm slowly adding back people who are public figures. So I called the person on the phone.

I'll tell the story only because I think it's instructive. Sure. And so I said to the person, the person said, I'll take down your address if you apologize to said reporter at the New York Times. And I said, for what? And they said, for stalking her? And I never stalked this person. What are you talking about? Stocking?

And, you know, she blocks me. I block her or whatever. And he said, you told everybody in Clubhouse that she was in the room. And I said, yeah, we were in Clubhouse together. and I said, hey, everybody who having this discussion, just so you know, there's a New York Times journalist in the room because Clubhouse is semi-private, it's in beta.

And she was writing a story about Clubhouse, and I wanted to let the person know who I was interviewing that there was a New York Times jurist in the room because they probably wouldn't know that. And that got to find a stalking. And I was like, okay, please don't use words like that because then a crazy person is going to docks me, which is exactly what happened.

And I'm not saying this trying to get any kind of like victim points. I'm a big boy. You know, I can handle myself. I understand this comes with the territory of being a public figure. So I looked this person up. Turns out he works in private equity.

Not too different than venture capital. So I look at the company he's with and turns out we know a couple of people in common. Paradoxically turns out his boss and I know 14 people in common. Whoops. I take a screenshot. I send it to him. I said, do you want me to apologize to?

said person. I understand your position. Here's your boss, and we know 14 people in common who are very good friends of mine. And this is my phone number if you'd like to talk this out. So the phone rings. And I said, listen, kid, I know you're, you don't mean any harm and you're just upset, but this is really dangerous. You know, I've had stalkers in the past kind of situation, and things can escalate and it's completely unnecessary. And he said, yeah, well, I said, what do you think I would do if somebody on my team doxed your boss? He said, you'd fire them. I said, yeah, I'm going to call your boss right now.

And you're going to get fired. I mean, I know you're only like, you know, a 23 or 24 year old kid, but this is a really stupid life lesson for you to learn. And it's like silence. And I'm like, how old are you? He's like, I'm 37. I'm like, what were you thinking? He's like, I'm just really angry. And I said, do you want to leave?

I'm not on the internet. I was like, do you want to delete it? Because I really don't want to call your boss and have you lose your job. And he wrote me a really nice and sincere apology letter. And I deleted it. And he deleted it and they just let it go. And I told everybody, like, please stop fighting. And then Balaji, who's a friend of the pod?

And he was doing a bunch of memes. Both individuals are so mad at each other that one of them is, you know, doing memes and trying to make it funny. And then the other person is saying it's targeted harassment. And everybody needs to stop. I'm only unhappy with one of them, but I'm surprised that Balaji's friends aren't stepping in and telling him that he's making himself look awful.

And whenever someone melts down like Elon does us on Twitter occasionally, I'm always very surprised that he doesn't have a collection of friends around him who can just sit him down and be like, look, dude, we all know you think you're right. I think you can assume in all cases a friend would say something. I'll just leave it at that. Well, they're not, they should listen more then. It's my take on it. You know, it's just people lose all empathy on these social networks.

And, you know, it becomes. comes a full contact sport, what I, my message to everybody has been from the beginning, and I did an interview with Axios, is just, you do listen to that. You did listen to it. Yeah, and I just trying to be reasonable and just say, listen, guys, we can have a vibrant debate, but don't make it so personal that crazy people who maybe don't have as much self-control do crazy things. And it, because there are crazy people out there, you know, and I'm sure that, you know, some percentage of my listeners might be capable of doing. equally horrible things.

And nobody wants, I don't think that the New York Times reporter had a question here would want me to be doxed. I'm 100% certain of that. And I would not want her harass her doxed either. So everybody just got to say with Twitter. I mean, this is why people don't like Twitter.

Because it can start off in a reasonable conversation and then it just spirals so quickly. It kind of does. Yeah, it's kind of weird. I mean, Alex, what do you think about the whole debate? Just putting aside like how nasty, got, but just the, you know, the tech industry versus tech, because you and I have been at this for a while now, and the coverage has, you know, gotten contentious.

You know, so I listened to your Axios interview because I wanted to prep for this little show. So I want to make sure that I heard your take on this in a different environment when I wasn't taking part in the conversation, so I could just listen. And I just fundamentally don't agree with your view of the balance in tech media coverage. And just to like, just to get a feel for this. I just went to tech wrench.com and I read all the headlines on the front page. And I went to the New York Times Technology section. I read through all the headlines on the Times. I went through a couple

pages of them. And you were saying, you know, eight, nine out of ten are these negative, hyper-negative, unfair stories and they're not. Most of them are neutral. A couple of them pointed out some flaws. Most of them are generically positive. Like if you go read TC to pick me up my home territory, we're talking about what companies are doing. Yeah, tech quench I would leave out of it.

Okay. But when I look at the New York times and if you look at Aaron Griffin or you look at Caras Swisher, you know, and those are but two, you know, and then. Of a large team. Of a large team, right? There's probably a dozen people. It's literally like seven or eight out of ten in my experience. Well, go read more reporters than them.

I mean, if you're saying that two people at times. You know, tech does deserve some things. I mean, listen, nobody's more critical than Zuckerberg than me, I think. I mean, you've been on the pod with me enough talking about that. And so, you know, what I would just like to see is when you're a subject, and I used to be a journalist and I do random acts of journalism on this podcast, and, you know, now I'm a subject or my companies are subjects, I, the amount of times a journalist calls me to tell me about some horrible thing and get comment on. And I'm just like, is there a way like one out of four times? I can tell you about something we're all positive, please? And the answer is no. Well, what's funny about this is you were talking about how people should get off. This is on the Axios podcast with Dan Premec, who I like quite a lot, how people should get on the phone and how much of this is just on Twitter. I think a lot of the contentiousness is on Twitter because I talk to VCs, part of my job all the time.

I talk to founders all the time. None of those ever comes up. And I think what we have is a couple of voices on the VC side who are looking only at a subset of total media coverage. and they're conflating that with all media is. And because they are paid to be generalists and thinkers, effectively, it's kind of a VCs, with a dose of optimism and someone else's money, they try to read into this and try to extrapolate from it,

and they end up looking pretty damn silly. I mean, Bologi's ideas about how to fix journalism are laughable. And I think that it's a small fraction of VCs that are actually engaged in this discourse about the media and how it's unfair to start up, because I don't, well, one, I don't agree with him. And also, no VCs that I talk to bring this up, even when we're off the record. It's only these couple of voices on Twitter.

And I don't agree with the complaints about the balance of coverage. And I just, I don't see it. Well, I mean, don't you think that post-Trump, you know, more publications are picking aside where the New York Times is a little bit more left-leaning since Trump. And, you know, the people who pick aside do better because people obviously will subscribe if the opinion page in the New York. New York Times speaks to you a little bit more. And, you know, the second they published something from the right, and listen, never voted for a Republican in my life. So it's not coming from a Republican standpoint.

I don't know why people think I would vote for Trump. I hate them. And I say that all the time. But, you know, when they fired the editor of the opinion page, it's giving the sense that, like, you know, it's a left-leaning publication that maybe is anti-capitalist. It feels anti-capitalist to me. I can't agree with really any of that. I think the Times has bent over backwards to avoid calling Trump racist, to avoid annoying the kind of bad faith media attacks from the American rights.

So I'm not going to give any play to that. I find it ridiculous. On the Bennett Times editorial page, I think, let's keep the line between the editorial section and the rest of the paper. And he was fired for incompetence, not for a particular political perspective. And I don't want to spend the whole pot on this. Yeah, no. It's a rabbit hole. We're going to go ahead.

But I just want to point out that, like, you know, The core element of your critique of media is the thing that I, that I disagree with. And that's where you and I can talk about this in hopefully fair-minded voices. But I will say that, you know, it's never going to be mad on the internet. And we could all breathe a bit. Well, and the thing I love about podcasts, which is why I'm kind of trying to spend more time on podcasts and less time on the Twitter is because this debate can be very reasonable, right? And when you hear each other's voices, it's in fact, paradoxically. You're not on Clubhouse, I take it as a journalist.

They didn't let you on? I have no interest in showing up. I'm on Clubhouse. You're on Clubhouse, Morgan? Mm-hmm. What are your thoughts on? It was a good segue then. Explain to people what's special about Clubhouse and why are people becoming addicted to it?

My perspective is probably going to be different than others. But Clubhouse became interesting because the valuation was ridiculous for an app that was private and had like 500 people on it, but also Andresen Horowitz invested in it. And CLF, Culture Leadership Fund, run by Chris Lyons, also participated. So we got all the cool black people on the app, which then black culture makes everything super duper cool, right? So like the first couple weeks, it's super sexy. You've got like really great conversations happening and like intentional conversations with celebrities and people that you don't usually get to talk to and they're just hanging out. Right. And you get to the,

listen. And then everybody started adding people. And so it was this inner group of people who were one person removed from each other, whether you're in Silicon Valley or you're an investor, you're a celebrity investor or whatever it is. And then it became now you're two, three people removed. And so I remember even, you know, all the black kind of tech people who've raised over a certain amount of money or black VCs are in there. And we'll be texting each other like, yo, you know, there's white people in this room, like, chill. You know, like we will, we will have have sub-d-Ms with each other and text with each other being like, you know, there's so many people listen in. Because you start off with, it's just you and your friends. And then all of a sudden,

you're like, there's a hundred people in here. Oops. Like, let me be quiet. So I actually stopped. I haven't listened. I haven't tuned in in the last like two or three weeks. I also think they have some weird things where like someone can invite you into a conversation and you're automatically unmuted. So there's like some things that can create some risk that I opted out. It's interesting you say that because I took a couple of week break from it because it's highly addictive because it's kind of like this weird hybrid of like talk radio or a conference call and you turn it on and there's usually three or four discussions and two or three are inane and one or two are interesting to you. And it is kind of weird like you open it up and Andreessen pulled the celebrity card and you got Kevin Hart, you know, or Oprah came in or Ashton Coucher's hanging out and you're like, okay, wow, that's pretty interesting. and having an interesting conversation. And I got into a conversation the other night

about this whole back and forth between tech and tech journalists and everything. And it just, the room got too big. And I was like, you know what? I'm done. I'm done. You know, I'm out. I was like, you know, 10 people, 15 people, okay.

But then I'm like, there's now, there's 150 people in here. And that's where I think there. And there's no, the other possible, challenges, there's no tools because they, it's in beta. Yeah. So you can't block somebody. You can't remove somebody from the room. it's got a weird like open internet kind of vibe to it.

I'm like you let everybody in here and it becomes a public app. We're not talking. Like why would I? That's just like talking on the record. Like why would I do that? It's too risky. I think they're going to add a feature where it's and actually the guy Paul. Yeah, he tweeted.

Well, he talked about it. Yeah, we could have private rooms. And so it'll, you know, that'll balance itself out. And you'll be able to invite people to rooms or people will be able to knock on the door maybe be let in, not be let in. Or I think their original idea, he talked about this one time, was like if Kevin Hart wants to test his material or has a fan club type thing,

you could pay $10 a month to be part of his fan club. And he says, I'm going to spend a couple hours a month here or maybe somebody like Tim Ferriss. What Paul said is he really wants to get the podcasters on there. And then I thought about it, because I was on there one night. I interviewed Ben Horowitz, Adam DeAngelo from Cora.

and one other famous person. And then I was like, what am I doing here? Like, this is how I make a living. I got to get back on my podcast. Like Ben Horowitz won't come on my podcast. They don't know who Jason Calicatus is. And Horowitz guys don't like me anyway. And so I can't get them on my pockets,

but they're willing to talk to me in Clubhouse. So I was like, you know what? They didn't let me invest. This is, I'm not making any money from this. I think I'm out. And it's also like now everybody's recording everything because on your phone you can just flip on the recorder. I'm surprised people actually are still talking as much as they

given how much now we know that people are recording. Right. That I assumed from the beginning people were recording, I assumed that if a journalist was in there, they were recording it covertly so that they could accurately quote people. And I'm not sure of the legality of it, actually, because it is not a phone system. I don't know.

What is the protocol today amongst journalists, do you think, Alex, on recording calls? I mean, I know you would always say, can I record this at the start of call? Yeah, I always ask. public forums, though, are different than private conversations. And so there's a good legal question there that I don't have the answer to because I just don't have the knowledge to answer that intelligently. But I'm curious, Jason, if you could have gotten into the clubhouse round, which was like 10 at 100 post or something, how much of your personal money would you have been willing to put into that at that price if you were allowed into it?

What's your max there? I offer to put 100. 100 times. I'll tell you why. if benchmark and Andreessen are going to put 10 million into it and it's got this kind of momentum and since it was such a ridiculous valuation, like ridiculous to a level that is insane. And then paying the founders $2 million in secondary is also very privilege. Such privilege.

I didn't want to say it, Morgan, but I don't think two black, I'm going to go ahead and agree with you that two black founders are not getting $2 million for an app with 500 people in it. Off the table? No. On the table, no. And if they did, can you imagine the reaction? Oh my gosh. We would get ripped apart on Twitter.

Exactly. So we still have some work to do on race in the industry, apparently. But my gamesmanship, since Alex, you asked about it, is number one, Indrisen Harowitz has so much skin in the game now. Because if this were to fail, I'm not saying it's too big to fail. But the reason why Mark Indreason and Ben Harrow, Horowitz, Felicia Horowitz, is her first name. Felicia is doing her Saturday Day party.

The reason they are pulling every single celebrity card they can pull to get people in there is because now, if it fails, which most startups do, it's not going to look very intelligent to have put the money in at that high evaluation and let them take $2 million off the table. therefore they're going to work really hard to make this work and Mark's on the board of Facebook so if it doesn't work I was just about to say yes so like when you start looking at the chess board here if this thing was going to fail they couldn't figure out a business model or it was going sideways

they just get a soft landing Mark just goes hey can you buy it for like 50 in cash or whatever yeah just give me my money back so my LPs don't think I'm an idiot and you know I'll take it all in Facebook equity which is going to go up anyway so there's like an easy end that was my game theory How long do you think it'll last? Do you think it'll exit in like 18 months or do you think it's going to write out?

Alex? I am notoriously bad at this, so I should definitely answer that. Let's play a game. Question time. So when does it leave beta in this timeline that we're making up? How long until it's public? They got to figure this out. I think it's going to be a while.

I think Q1. Q1, 2021? Is that fair for this good? Yeah, I agree with that. I think we will know if it's going to be a success or failure. by the end of that calendar gear. So I would say six quarters from now, we're going to have a pretty good feel for it. And that will determine if Facebook is threatened by it

and therefore buys it, if it goes middle of the road and kind of just half-hasses along, or if it flops and then it gets a soft landing at Zuckerberg. Those are my three things. I would say like 20, 50, 30 percent chances on those. Twitter could buy it. They just did their voice. They're in their voice testing.

True. True. But then I'd have to use it, though, because I'm a big Twitter fan. I would be conscripted into the army. Yeah. What do you think, Morgan? I think that they are going to figure out how to manage the privacy thing. I think that CLF and 1816 Z is smart enough that they've done this before. They're going to figure out how to fix it.

So I think that they go for the goal. So it'll be a while. Yeah, I think, you know, $10 million is a lot of money to raise when you have a five-person company. That will probably go to 15. You only need 15 people to run a mod or an app company. You put two or three people on the iOS, you get two or three designers, two or three product managers, two Android people, back end person and the founders can't have more than 15 people or else it kind of works against you. And if you pay them all, you know, top dollar and they're getting 150K a year, it's a pretty easy company. It's not an expensive company to run.

You spend three, four million a year max. So it shouldn't be very difficult. The thing, I'll give you my prediction on it. Yeah. easiest thing in the world to copy. A lot of people are inspired. I'm getting a lot of interesting, um,

let me just put it. I'm not getting a lot of interesting test flights. I'm getting a lot of interesting, hey, I heard you got left out of the round, J-Cal. What do you think about this spin on Clubhouse? I got four of those discussions going on right now.

Four. Are anything good? Anything interesting? All of them are good. All of them are great. All of them are great. I do. think that that's just because audio is a thing because we're a court.

It's not just clubhouse. It's audio, period. And, you know, you start Twitter added audio. And, you know, the, what was the other one, the party one that was video that you, House party? House party, which basically Clubhouse copied house party, but not video. So there are. It's a worst version of it.

There's 50, there's 50 ways to kind of make this work. And there are people who have existing businesses. that have scale already, that have ideas that they want to spin out. And there are people who are notable, who have followings that are large, who said, you know, hey, Jake Al, what do you think if my audience, which is not de minimis, had this type of thing with these two changes? And I can tell you, out of the four ideas, all four are better ideas than Clubhouse today. Now, I don't know clubhouse is a complete roadmap. $10 million is a lot of money. $10 million is a lot of money.

But again, as I said, you only need a handful of people to run something like this. So I think this will become, I think this is going to be like, what's the last time we had a lot of people do the same service? Vine. Yeah, short video of Vine, right? There were a couple of those. It's going to be like one of those races where there might be, you know, clubhouses. It's going to be clubhouse's race to lose, but they could lose it. That's my belief.

The Clubhouse for X, like it was Uber for X and Airbnb for X and all these things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'm excited by it. I love community. I like the idea of people getting to hang out in safe and fun environments. I have a video game group with some friends that are now across the country. And we play games together, but mostly we're talking. And just having that audio connection, having that kind of group experience is so delightful.

And I don't know if public rooms. What game do you play? I'm curious. I don't play anything very well, but I play Destiny 2 on PS4. and I also play F1, 2019, on PC, which I'm even worse at somehow. I play Star, I play Starcraft 2, old school on PC sometimes at night. But I just play as random people.

I grew up. I grew up on Brude War. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was a big SC2 guy in college, and I actually sponsored a show match back in the early e-sports days. Yeah, that's some good stuff. Right about now Morgan's like, what are you nerds talking? I play Civilization.

You play civilization? Oh, she plays Civ. Oh, really. See, this is, I like strategy because I'm a poker player and I like all the strategy games. I liked Age of Empires, Command and Conquer. That was kind of my jam because it was like chess on speed, you know? Honestly, that would be such a good Twitter threat is like everyone like secretly revealing what games they play on the low. Yeah, I play threes.

That's what I, that's my like go to bed. I play threes or two plus two or whatever those like little number games are. I find those like very relaxing. Like I get into like a little zone about it. hey, I teased giving Harvard $50,000 to take Zoom classes. I don't know if I even have to ask your guys' opinions on this. No. But what?

Crazy. But who's going to pay? That's my thing is like, and then we're going to watch people pay for it. People are going to do this, right? So this just shows you how bankrupt and insane higher education is that they would have the audacity to charge people $50,000 for this. and that is what a racket it is, right? Right. It makes no sense.

And then they say they're going to test, it might have been, I can remember if it was them or someone else, they're going to test students every two days and take away sports. It's like no sports, which is like you're D1. And then you're going to test people every two days? Come on.

I don't understand. Wait. I got tested and it was not great. I didn't enjoy having that thing stuck in the bowels of my head. I did that one. I did two. I did two. of the blood tests and they both came back negative.

There's some new tests coming that are going to be dope, though, where you're going to be able to, like, do a swab. That's not like the deep crazy swab. And in 15 minutes, for 10 bucks, you get it. So maybe that's part of it. They're banking on an easier test, but still. Here's an idea. What if Harvard instead said it's 5K?

And we're going to open the door. And anyone who wants to have a Harvard education for 5K, you're on Zoom can do it. And the whole world should show up because education should be open. And we're no longer constrained by building. buildings, and we're not greedy, and we do have a great brand. We already have $40 billion in our endowment or whatever it is. Let's just go teach people. Let's go invest in actual education of everyone that we can if we think we're so special. That would be revolutionary,

game changing, progressive, interesting, and it would also help so many people get a leg up because they'd have that Harvard on their resume forever. To your point, Alex, you're saying, if you're so good at teaching, teach more people. Teach more people. It's on Zoom, guys. You can do more than 20 people on a call, but instead Harvard wants to maintain the exclusivity because they're jerks and because they're selfish ingredient and not focusing on education, they're focused on maintaining their own hegemony in the education market globally. It's not great. Yeah, I don't understand doing that when their endowment is so large.

It's like the interest on your endowment, you can wait a year. You can skip a year. Is it really that expensive to operate? It's like you're going to go in a deficit anyways, having people on campus and having food service and all these other things. It doesn't make any sense. And so the expectation is you put a bunch of young people into dorms and they sit on their computers and they watch Zoom. And then you're trusting that none of them are going to kiss each other at any point in time.

Oh, that was ridiculous. Or go on a date. Right. Like, I kind of think. Right. They're like, you can't go into each other's dorms. Only people in the dorms in the dorm itself can stay in that dorm. on.

Yeah. I lost 12 hours. Why am I here? Right. Yeah. Kind of think maybe somebody might, there might be some necking going on in college. Somebody might get a little kissy, kissy. So here's the question.

Yeah. What is the use case for why someone would say, okay, I'll see you there? My parents are so rich and I am so entitled that I just want a Harvard sweatshirt and logo on my LinkedIn page. I mean, that's really what we're saying here. because you could watch the same videos on, are they on Coursera or edX or whatever it is? Yeah, they're on one of them.

They're on one of them. But they've always been on those. MIT also is like, MIT put all their stuff online. And there was this one kid. I don't know if you read about this. He took every MIT course for his like masters in AI or something, wrote all the documentation down.

And I was talking, and I've told the story before, I was talking to somebody who's, you know, very famous in the industry. And I said, would you take that person who took all the courses on their own and documented and put it in a Manila folder and handed it to you? Or somebody who went there. And he's like, well, of course I take the former. I want the person who was the hustler.

And this person's writing a book about it, by the way, on how he did that. And I think it's, I was actually having this debate with my wife. And I was talking to her about how, like, everybody has access to YouTube now. every skill you could want to learn is on YouTube. There are some ways in which the world has gotten demonstrably better for learning skills. And still people are watching five hours of television a night. The average American watches four or five hours of television to this day. When I meet young people and they're like, hey, what should I do?

I'm like, stop watching television for two years and learn how to code, be a designer, be a salesperson, anything. Just get any course you can get and just load up on skills. So the accreditation is making less and less sense. And I thought the whole people buying their way into Ivy League schools with like Photoshopped photos would end this nonsense where people are just, the idea of credentialing is over. This feels like the last, you know. Okay. So yes, but if you're white, if you're not white, I think the credential, what?

Yeah, but you took the words out of my mouth. Like, I think people still need credentials and need that stamp of approval. I mean, you do? Absolutely. I went and got a stamp of approval as a startup. I was like, you know what? I don't care how good our company is. I still need one little Silicon Valley stamp of approval.

Like what, 500 startups or YC or like some investor? I did 500 startups. You get a little logo. You get a little logo. You have your little demo day. You get the guaranteed tech crunch article. Like, you just have to play the game. You can't be too naive to think that you're,

you're going to be the one who didn't have to play the game. I just feel like the skills are so, you know, especially with remote work now, like because we're not in the same offices, the person who just gets something done very quickly and send you the result, it feels like that's the person who's going to win. Maybe I'm naive, but like if you need it. It's just not there yet. You're close, Jason. There's a leveling.

You're directionally accurate. I think you're right. Credentials are losing their power. I have many friends that don't have college degrees that are doing very, well. I think your right skills and competence are the thing that matter. But we're in this little circle here. And a lot of people outside of the circle are still essentially operating like they always have. And they need, you know, four-year degree or at least two years than right-diction. And we're in tech. You know, we're not doctors. We're not lawyers. We're not accountants. We're not also

in precautions. Yeah. If there is certification, like brain surgery, yeah, you're not going to learn on YouTube. Although I'll have to say, like, there are the, there have been some people. who have learned how to fly on simulators and on YouTube and then stolen planes. Like, this has become like a bit of a thing. And in med school, they do simulations and 3D stuff. And I mean, they do that in med school, too. I think this was in a science fiction film or I'm sorry, a science fiction novel where some kid basically in the simulator got so good at surgery that they became the

greatest surgeon ever because they were just, you know, it's almost like, um, Ender's game. Remember Ender's game? I don't spoiler alert, but it's not a video game. It's the real world. So it's interesting to say that my wife is now in her fourth year of residency, and she just finished her year three. So I'm living with someone who's going through this really advanced credentialing process.

I think for those sorts of jobs, we should maintain the kind of the current system as it is, but for everything else we should tear it down, especially down to weird things like hair technicians and support that are kept out of work by really ridiculous government rules and regulations that are that are asinine and that are always somehow much more hard to get than to become a police officer, which is, uh, mm-done, done, done. Who would have thought? Yeah, well, and there we are, policing. I mean, that's the ultimate

one where we have to rethink it. Yeah. We don't have enough time on this show. No. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I was, there was a time period, I don't know, maybe four or five years ago, I was starting to see a lot of non-lethal policing equipment. So, like, you know, guns where you shoot a net, guns that don't kill you, you know, all this kind of stuff. And then you just think about it and it's like, yeah, none of that stops somebody who kneels on somebody's neck for eight minutes and just murders them and suffocates them. I'm like, not, this isn't even an issue of somebody being shot with a gun.

Let's talk a little bit about diversity in tech since I think that it's been a very interesting couple of months. I've literally had two or three investors call me and say, can you introduce me to a black founder I can invest in? I'll just say it as simply as that. Morgan, is it changing for you as a founder who's black and female? Are you finding people reaching out and saying, hey, I need to. solve this problem in my portfolio? Can I invest in your company? Or can I support you in some way? And then how does that feel as somebody who maybe was underestimated slash, you know, ignored previously by other VCs? So a couple things. I think I have a privilege that I have to acknowledge,

which is I've already raised my Series A. I've already made it through a variety of steps. So I'm on the Series B track, right? And so for me, you know, you don't just invest in a series B out of white guilt. Right. You got to have numbers. Yeah, like we got serious numbers. I have a serious business. You know, this is a like, we're going to keep it going kind of a plan. We've got pivot, you know, et cetera, platform, all the things. So I think for me, most people actually look at me and say, Morgan, we know that you are connected in the space. You advise entrepreneurs. You're an angel investor.

We know that there are probably people that you know that we can't see yet because of our own blinders. Who should I reach out to? Who should we connect with? And there's a lot of noise. There's a lot of new organizations popping up. There's a lot of new funds popping up. And so for me, I've been just triaging.

Like I'm just a quarterback right now. So, you know, I send out my own little email that says, hey, here's like five black female founders. who are raising their seed right now and have already raised X amount and here's their information. And you're not going to find this on a public database because there's no one to put in those real numbers out there, right? Like I never. No, I mean, our industry is opaque by design. People do not want to post their roadmap anywhere. What are the organizations that you feel are making the most impact and that people need to know about? So in terms of discovery

of underrepresented founders, the two that I love the most, that I think have the widest reach around America that don't have the kind of exclusivity tone that I think scares and and keeps so many people out is one is Founder Jim, which focuses on underrepresented founders and teaching them about VC and if you should even raise VC and if you are, here's how you do it. And they bring all your kind of Silicon Valley Insiders in as coaches to do kind of AMAs, etc. And that's 100% virtual. And do they invest or do they just mentor? No investment, no equity. It's a fee, which I actually think is more reasonable. Oh, okay, cool. So it's like just buying a subscription to Masterclass or something. You pay a fee. Exactly. It's an online community. Yeah.

50 bucks a month, 100 bucks a month, 500 bucks a month. You have any idea? No, it's expensive. It would be more like a virtual incubator. Got it. Okay. So I don't know. How much did 500 startup cost me like $150,000 or something. So, but take out some Zeros. Yeah, perfect. I think that that is a really important point because the thing I hear from black founders, people of color, women, underestimated folks, which is the term I like best,

underrepresented, underestimated, is where to start, and do you want to even meet me is a blocker. And, you know, Jackie, who works with us here at launch, she created founder university with me and she does one for underrepresented founders. I think you've spoken at it actually. Yeah, I did. And once we did that and we had underrepresented founders as an exclusive thing, the number

of underestimated founders who contacted us went through the roof. Because you signaled you care. I remember when I first fundraised, I went and looked at all the other black founders who'd fundraised and I looked at all the VCs that had invested in them. And I made a list of those people because I said, look, If you're, if you've invested in one, then you can at least understand me slightly better than somebody who has indicated that you can't even invest. I'm a really black company, you know?

So I'm serving black people. We're solving black problems. I've got a majority POC staff, a majority black woman leadership team. Like, you know, we're very black. So if you can't even invest in one black person who's solving some random non black problem and is an enterprise SaaS company that's like, and this person went to Stanford or I like whatever, they've got all the credentials, except they're black. If you can't even invest in that guy, you're probably not going to invest in me. Yeah. And what's the other company?

You had another one. You said you. Oh, and then one more. And this is most, more for women, is actually all raise has been doing some interesting thing. And I know that they've gotten, they've been, they've gotten a lot of mixed bags because they weren't super diverse when they first launched. And there's a lot of feedback present company included about like, you got to, you got to up your diversity. Like, you can't just do the white woman thing. But. But, I think that they've listened and made some adjustments. And so they're doing these really cool programs. And I just have been happy with the acceleration of all of their work.

And I think being a black female founder is just such a unique, like, part of the pie. Right. It's already like less than 2% to women. And then even further, I mean, I don't even know the number. It's got to be less than 1%. It's definitely not half of the women are black. No way. So that is to me,

I love Allrays and what they've been doing, and I'm sure there's many groups that I'm missing out on. So don't attack me on Twitter for it. I think it's a very interesting point because we were sitting here 10 years ago, and the conversation was, why are there no women VCs? And all of these VC firms, you know, I'm an angel investor, slightly different.

But VC firms were six white guys. And then they're like, okay, we've got to get a woman in here because, man, does this team page look bad? And they're like, the big hack at that time, was, oh yeah, here's our partner, the marketing and comms partner. And it was like, come on. Like, can they write a check? And it was like, no, but they can get you on CNBC.

And it was like, come on. Really? Like real window dressing kind of stuff. But then they, all of a sudden we saw a more female, founder, a more female representation, Asian female, white female, as you're saying. Yeah. Latino. I mean, you can't name 10 black female VCs.

I could challenge most. people, they probably couldn't name 10. Monique Woodward? Arlen Hamilton. Two? Yeah. There's more. I can name.

I know there's more. Keep going. No, tell me. Tell me. Because I'm not very good with names, but I'm just going down the list of people who've had in the podcast recently. I mean, there's tons of angels like Heather Hiles. She was, I mean, there's just, I'm not going to go into it gets too low.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of black male VCs, too, a lot more, I should say. When they have funds that they, so they've raised $20 million funds, $15, $30, $50, $150, $250 million funds. I think the biggest a black woman has raised is maybe $75 or $100. It is one of the final pieces of the puzzle, I think, in terms of just we have to get it done. I mean, the fact that we're sitting here still having this discussion, it's 2020, it's just bizarre to me. Yeah, but whose problem is it to solve? I think there's no one person's responsibility that it is. And I, you know, I certainly do think it's like white people have to solve this to some extent. I also started my company because I was like, I'm not waiting for white people to solve my problems. So we got to get going on our end too. Like my friends who are founders need to exit so they can just go be billionaires. And like let's just be the PayPal mafia and like do our own thing. Like why? I think that's like a great insight as well. Alex, something, Ted? Oh, I was just going to say on the doing something part of this. I have a list

of VCs that I talk to. And I've started just right now, the list of every black VC that I hear about. And I'm trying to expand my entire roster of people that I talk to you for stories for insight that I get on the phone with. And I'm just going to, I guess, brute force diversify it and try somewhat harder to not be. I had some diverse people on my list, but it was mostly white dudes. And I just decided that that wasn't okay. And I wasn't going to try to do this by small steps. I was just going to go find everybody and try to get their email. address and start talking to them. And so I think that's the kind of thing that will increase representation in stories and media and will have a positive effect. And I'm encouraged that

I'm not alone in trying to be less bad about this. I'm trying to be better. And I think the last thing I would say is like let's ask black people about their businesses, you know, like one thing I even appreciate this conversation. We're not just sitting here talking about black people all the time. Like we're not just inviting me onto the show to just talk about blackness. Like no, why? Like, I can talk about a variety of things. I'm always going to represent black people from my voice as my lens of the world and my company and my community. But at the same time, let's also not just continue to perpetuate it by then saying, oh, we must have a black person on this panel. And then we ask the black person. Like, what does it like to be black? And it's like,

well, why don't you ask them like, why they're, they've raised $10 million. They're like, how they grew their team or like, whatever questions you ask everyone else. Yeah. That, That is, I think, a super important thing for people to keep in mind because I hear that over and over again when we're interviewing people for our accelerator, which is like, wow, you guys actually are interested in our business and the details of our business. And not once did we ask you about like, hey, what's it like to be a black female founder? You know, it's like, tell me about your customers. What's your lifetime value? What's the, can you take me through the unit economics? It's our job to increase and find more founders, but we should be asking the same questions, right?

It should be the same process. But we do internally as we just hold ourselves to, we just didn't find enough people for this class. We, you know, when we're talking about the accelerator, we really need to work harder to get more people to apply. We have to go find people to apply. We have to go let people know that, you know, we are looking to make those investments. And now since we've got a pretty decent track record, it's not exactly where I wanted to be. But, I mean, I feel like we've made massive progress in the last two years. Now I'm getting VCs asking me, like, how did you do it?

And I'm like, how did you get you deal flow there? I'm like, do an event just for people who are underrepresented and watch the magic, right? Like, it actually does work. The number of reason people told us was, oh, when you did an event for underrepresented founders, we knew that you cared. We knew that you were like actually sincere. Whereas coming to a, you know, a generic launch festival event or tech crunched us up,

how do you know that you're welcome, right? You got to make it explicit people. At least that's the leak in my game. It's a balance. It's like you have to be explicit, but also don't diminish. So it's like, you know, I want to,

if you have caviar at your event for white people, I want caviar at the black event. In fact, add champagne. Like, 100. Yeah. You know, so that's that's the other thing it's like people are making the diversity funds i'm like okay but why like you just invest out of the main fund why do we need a separate but equal fund like just

i thought that was a weird moment for indreason horowitz as well i think people misunderstood misunderstood misunderstood what nate was doing because i saw everybody all of a sudden start dunking on nate i asked him to come on the pockets he said he was too busy i indreason horroes i mean his PR team was probably like nah no indreason horwitz had to listen to this be like, Morgan is too close to the people. And Dris and Horvist doesn't like me. But anyway, I put that aside. Mark and Dresa specifically doesn't like me.

Mark can't decide. He blocks me, then he follows me, then he unfollows me. It's very weird, but he's a weird dude anyway. Or I should say quixotic. But Nate, I thought what Nate was doing was they're going to be giving like small grants to people to kind of get started, not venture capital investments. Am I right? Did you read up on that?

One, I think that they made a mistake announcing it in the mix because this is something that has been on Nate's heart and mine for quite some time. He had talked to me about this a while ago. So I think that was just a mistake, frankly. And they obviously recognize that mistake after the fact, but it's too late. And then two, it's a donor advised fund. So it's a not-for-profit. It's not a-

venture fund. Venture fund. So that's completely different, you know? And I don't think that that would. was made clear. I do think people got caught up in the hype of saying we're doing this cool thing and so they wanted it to sound sexy and sound cool and sound like they were really making an impact. And it was like, but then you maybe overreached a little bit and therefore people called you out. But in reality, it was actually just a donor advised fund. And they've probably already

raised an additional 10 million into it. And it's probably fine now. Yeah. That was such a weird moment to watch people dunking on somebody trying to, who's a black man, who's trying to help people get into the industry. And I'm like, that's, why not hear I'm out? It's so weird. And, and meanwhile, there are funds just as big as Andrews in Horwitz and firms with just as big as Andrews in Horwitz who've done zero. Zero. Right. So somebody stands up and they're like, I have an idea. Like, let's try to get more people to start companies and give them grants and do some cool stuff with this donation of our fund. And instead of that, they're like, oh, you have $8 billion under management. You made a billion dollars off of the sky. But that's what I'm

saying, but this is Twitter. Like all these things that we're talking about right now are all the attacks that happened on Twitter. And that's why I think it's just whack, you know? And at the same time, I think for our community of people who do want to hold others accountable, let's shine that exact same light on all the people who are still quiet who have made no investments in black founders. At least Andreessen Horwitz has Maven. It has the healthcare company escapes me right now. But like they have black founders that they've invested in. And others don't. It's a good place to end. I've taken enough of your time. Everybody check out Blavity and follow Morgan and Alex on the Twitter. Everything's in the show notes. Oh, look, Mark Andreessen and just called in.

Let me see what he has to say. He left me a voicemail. I will now explain to you in detail why you're an idiot. Oh, well. I forgot about the sound board. You didn't use the whole show. Mark just sent me a, that was Mark on Clubhouse, which is just talking to me on Clubhouse. And I think what he said was,

I will now explain to you in detail why you're an idiot. Wow, look at that. Mark and Driesen explained it to me twice. Inject that into my veins. Inject that into my veins. My wife is going to kill me because I said it'd be gone an hour. It's been two. Oh, my Lord.

I am so sorry. All right. See you all next time on this week. service. Bye-bye.