This Week in Startups - E1088: Building Zero Fasting with Kevin Rose, properly pricing consumer apps, benefits of fasting & more with Big Sky Health CEO Mike Maser

Episode Date: July 28, 2020

Follow Mike: https://twitter.com/mmaser Get Zero Fasting: https://www.zerofasting.com/ Follow Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

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free shipping at modloft.com slash twist. Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. I'm really excited about our next guest because like me, he's been a around for a while. And he's built a lot of apps, a lot of startups. He's got a lot of scar tissue and lessons along the way. And he's going to share them with you today. My guess is none other than Mike Mazur from Big Sky Health. You may not know the name Big Sky Health, but if you have been fasting, you have probably been using an app called Zero, which I've talked about all the time. And you might think that Kevin Rose is the founder of it because he's involved in it somehow. We'll figure out what that involvement is today. But Mike Mazer is.

has been in the industry since the web 1.0 days. And he hired an intern, marketing intern at some point, associate from a Craigslist ad, my good friend Kevin Rose. And then Kevin hired him to go to dig, a little company that Google was going to buy for $100 million at the last moment. Google pulled out of the deal, brutal. Mike also spent a bunch of time at Electronic Arts,

doing all of the big licensing titles and doing the marketing for those, you know, the Lord of the Rings kind of video games and seems like they made 20 of them. And then went on to create FitStar, which was bought by Fitbit, which was a really innovative iPad app. And that leads him to today when he is building a little collection of apps, one in meditation, oak, one of them in mindful drinking to cut alcohol consumption. That seems like something Kevin Rose would benefit from or has his fingerprints on called less. I'm joking, Kevin. But he, you know, he likes a, he likes a spirit or two. And then of course, I think the home run of all home runs, the leading fasting app, zero, which, you know, when I use it,

seems to have 700,000 people or so fasting concurrently. What's the usage like? And welcome to the program, Mike Mazur. Thanks, Jason. Great to see you. Great to be here. Yeah. and a great rundown. I should capture that for my own bio. But yeah, Zero is, it's just been an incredible run. And, you know, during COVID, we've seen as many health apps usage shoot up. So on any given night, you were talking about, you know, people concurrently fasting using Zero. You know, we're 850,000.

Oh, so close to a million. You're almost got your second comma. Dose comma is coming. And those comments going. And what's amazing is you can see week over week, you know, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday are the big, big nights. And then, you know, Friday, Saturday, Sunday for obvious reasons, it trails off. But it's around 800, 850,000 on the given night. I noticed it seemed to have doubled in the last six months.

Am I correct? Because it seemed like it was at three or four hundred thousand at the end of last year. You've doubled in the last six months, the active fasters? More than doubled. So December of 19. to today were more than 2x, both daily fasters and monthly active users. And part of that is the January effect. You know, people come in, new year, new you kind of stuff, and we get a natural bump

as to most of the health and fitness apps. But then we saw this another huge trunch of growth. Not right at the beginning of COVID. I think at the beginning of COVID, actually we saw down usage because people were, you know, they were freaking out. Disracted. Yeah. distracted. They were just trying to figure out where the world was going. But then around April,

it really ticked up and has remained. I guess people, like I did, I was fasting. And then that was exactly my pattern. I added the quarantine 15. It was probably less like the quarantine 10. And then I've been back on the app. And then lo and behold, I had emailed you earlier and said, why can I pay for this app? Like there's a bunch of features I want, but you're not letting me pay for it. You just launched the paid version. Explain to people, zero plus, yeah. Explain to people what they get in the basic app, which has been free for a couple years now, I think, and then what they get in the paid app. Sure.

Well, the basic app, and we should talk about that transition because that was really, you know, one of the most challenging launches I've ever done is taking a huge user base that's been free for years over to a paid product. But in terms of free versus paid, really the easiest way to think about it is the free product is more of, utility. You can track your fast. We give you some basic content. You get your biometrics and stats, things like that. And always the vision for zero is to provide more guidance. A lot of people, when they're starting fasting, they don't really know what they should be doing, what the, what the protocol should be. They don't know how they might feel during fasting, how to work out, what might happen to their sleep. So with zero plus, you get all of that knowledge. You get, you understand a lot of what's happening inside your body when you're going through

different phases of fasting. You know, a 16-hour fast creates very different biomechanics and outcomes than maybe a three-day fast. So we have this coach feature, which on board you, it asks you a bunch of questions, kind of what your fasting history, what are your goals. And then it provides a longitudinal program for you to follow. And it'll algorithmically adjust if you are, we'll check in with you on a weekly basis. And if you're wanting to push harder and sort of increase the duration of your fast over time, we'll help you do that or we can dial it back.

And then a ton of content. So our chief medical officer, Peter Attia, is one of the foremost, you know, world experts in longevity, incredibly humble guy. So he probably wouldn't say that about himself, but he is. And so we have, you know, hundreds of videos and audio clips and segments and articles that really delve into the science. of fasting and also the lifestyle of fasting. So you get all of that with zero plus as well as really interesting correlations of your data. So you'll see how fasting affects your sleep, fasting affects your resting heart rate, all the things that fasting pretty quickly, I know you've

been doing it for a while, can have a pretty quick and dramatic impact on. And so it gave you that deeper dive into your biometrics. Yeah, I thought that it was really interesting how when you click on the center of the wheel and you use like a sort of like a clock, a circular clock to, you know, track your progress. It showed you the phases you were in, you know, going fasting zones. Yeah, the fasting zones. But when you click on that center and you try to learn more about the fasting zones, hey, that's when you get kicked into the upgrade cycle. And it's only 50 bucks a year or something, four bucks a month, five bucks a month. It's, it's actually, it's nine, 99 a month. Okay. Uh, 6999 a year. Okay. Um, but, you know, we've had a few

promotions. We had a big promotion for our existing user base, bringing them over. And yeah, I mean, we were committed, again, because we had this huge user base. Most companies don't start free and stay free for as long as we did, or maybe they move into advertising, but they don't make the subscription ask when you have as big a user base as we do in most cases. And so we were committed, hey, let's keep everything free that was free to really reward users who have been with us and not pull the rug out from under them. But it just put the onus on us to create a lot more value in the paid product. And so we're happy if you want to keep using it for free. We're obviously happy if you want to come in and pay. And we're in V1 of zero plus. It's literally been out for

not even eight weeks. And our roadmap is super exciting about what we're taking it. Yeah. It seems like it was more than enough to convince me. What is the expectation, what was your expectation ballpark in terms of conversions, 10% of users, 5% of users, and then ballpark, what would a founder expect to convert? Low single digit percentages, 1, 2% convert on something like this? Yeah, I think, you know, what we saw at FitStar, and that's, that was my kind of comp. You know, we saw around 3% conversion, you know, on the aggregate, because you've got different conversion rates on Android versus iOS. I think, you know, a really great conversion rate, if you can sustain it is around 5%

and if you get 5% plus you're in kind of rarefied air now of course it differs by the realm that you're in the type of app that we're talking about but 5% is what you want to see and we had dramatically lower expectations because we had this huge existing user base

they've been getting a lot of value from the free app many people were telling me before we launched plus like you know you're going to have a really tough time. And we had an expectation of very low single digit percent. And, you know, we're eight weeks in, but after launch, we've almost tripled our forecast on the upside. So it's been lots of work to do, tons of experimentation. We have an amazing team that's, you know, iterating not only on creating new features and more value, but also, you know, all the experiments that you need to do to get that conversion up. Yeah. But we're, you know, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're,

really excited about the early results. When we get back from this break, I want to understand pricing and how you determine the price of these consumer subscriptions at apps, because the value of doing a consultation with a dietitian would be the equivalent, I think, of using something like zero fasting plus or zero plus, rather, which would cost hundreds of dollars a month, at least, thousands of dollars a year. but people also have now been trained to have Netflix or Disney for $7,8 a month, or a video game for $50 a year that provides hundreds of hours of entertainment. So I'm curious how you think about the pricing of these new health apps like Calm or Steasy

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plus a free 10-pound scale to get started. That's pb.com slash twist, TWIST, to experience huge savings in your shipping costs and a free trial of SendPro Online from Pitney Bowes. Thanks again to Pitney Bowes for supporting the pod. Hey, everybody, we're talking about apps, subscription apps, and of course fasting with Mike Mazur, the, I guess, co-founder and CEO of Big Sky Health or the founder?

Founder, yeah, founder and CEO. Great. And so we were talking a bunch about Zero Fasting. What is Kevin Rose's involvement in the company? He's a co-founder or an advisor, investor? What is he, what is his involvement? Because I know, you know, he's, I saw he was starting the mindfulness, like, Facebook group when he was starting all this. And I was like watching him experiment.

Well, what's the relationship between you two on a business level? Yeah. So Kevin and I, you know, go way back. And actually, Kevin started Zero. I had gone through some medical challenges and used fasting as part of that therapy. And Kevin saw the success I had using fasting, decided while I was at Fitbit, after selling FitZard of them, he decided to go out and build like a weekend project. And it was a very simple but recognizable manifestation of Zero today, just a timer. And he could track fast.

And this is back in 2017, I think. And then when I left Fitbit and decided I wanted to go headlong into this world, and Kevin wanted to go work at True and kind of at abandoned Zero, I took it over. So Kevin's the creator of the original product. And I went to True in April of, True Ventures in April of 2018, where Kevin was then a venture partner and Tony Conrad, who's our board member now, and went to them and said, hey, I have a vision for this. Kevin, why don't I take it over? We'll do a seed round of funding. And then you stay involved as the original creator and part of the investment team. And that's how it's stood until today.

And he's very involved in the future reviews and ideas for the product going forward. You hired him as a marketing associate. When he was like 20 years old, he just answered a Craigslist ad. and you've been pretty good at hiring talent. Tell me about that moment in time when Kevin Rose comes walking into your office at the age of 20, his age of yours. And what did you think?

Well, I mean, Kevin and I have been friends for 20 years now. That was back in around 2000. Yeah. I was a CMGI company, and I didn't really know what I was doing. I was director of marketing. I had left Intel as a marketing manager, kind of a rank and file employee.

First startup, first, you know, head of marketing job for me. And I knew I needed some help really on the marketing side, but analysis and product ideas. And I had a small budget, small headcount. And I put an ad in Craigslist, I think, or Monster, one of the early job boards. Kevin called me up. We kind of instantly had a rapport and he seemed really on the ball, even though his career was just getting off the ground. I think I was his first or second boss.

and he just made a great impression. And my gut told me, you know, maybe I'm taking a flyer on this guy, but I usually trust my gut on these things, which has proven to be generally good. And I brought him out to San Francisco. He was in Vegas. Brought him out to San Francisco. And very quickly, he became kind of my right hand, helped us, you know, grow the company, even though the eventual outcome wasn't great for the company.

And we became mostly really good friends. So I saw the writing on the wall for that company, left. Kevin stayed, but we remained friends up until today. So you brought him to the ship, then you abandoned ship, and then he never lets me forget that. Yeah, no, I know that. And so, but you had worked at CMGI, which is hilarious for people who don't know, 25 years ago, a guy named David Weatherall. Am I correct?

Is that the right guy? I remember I interviewed him when I was a journalist. I think he was up in Boston on that Route 128 kind of Boston tech circle. But CMGI was essentially like a soft bank slash Y combinator hybrid where they would start their own internet companies. They had billions of dollars in cash and they were publicly traded, I believe. And they had hit like a $50 billion market. It had something insane.

Them in Vertical Net. There were a couple of these. Ideal Lab was going to go public. And the idea was it was a startup studio, right? Yeah, they were the poster child for, you know, startup studio slash, I don't know what their exact thesis was. I didn't work for CMGI proper. I worked, I was a portfolio company of them. But they just spread dollars and were riding the wave of, you know, no fundamentals in these companies.

Eyeballs. Everything was eyeballs based. I still remember to this day, that was the catchphrase of the time. And, I mean, they were sponsoring stadiums for, you know, $50 million. and just doing all the things that have become kind of memes or mythology of that time. And yeah, we were in that circle. And then as fast as it went up, it cratered. And it was during that crater time that I thought, okay, I've got a rent to pay.

I'm in San Francisco and left Kevin. He stayed a little bit longer, but eventually he went on to his own great career. And this is what, 2002 or something? This is 2001. Oh, so before the dot-com crash, right. because CMGI was still existed. It was really interesting when you think about that moment in time and I really haven't thought or talked on this podcast about the dot-com era in five or 10 years, maybe. Maybe we talked about it in the beginning because it's such ancient history.

Moral timers. We can relate to this. Well, just think about this for a second, Mike. When you think about capturing eyeballs, that's engagement, that's intention, that's attention, which is exactly what Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube are based on today because that engagement turns into advertising. The only thing they got wrong was that it was really the data, right? It wasn't just the engagement. It was the engagement data. What did people watch? What did they engage with? Which is really interesting. They got it right and they went really bad. There was no sense of unit economics either. Like today, you can look at eyeballs and engagement as top of funnel, but then what does it accrue to? And that's where there was no answer. People had no historical information on how much a user was worth. So a company with a million user, We now know if you're Facebook, Twitter, whatever, we can actually tell you in which country how much they make per user per month.

And it's five bucks or ten bucks or three dollars or thirty bucks a year. So you can actually value a business based on that today. But they got so much right if you think about it. It was just the timing wasn't sustainable and the way they were putting capital. I wonder if people will look at SoftBank as that moment in history as well or if some bank will get it right because there actually is

there, there in a lot of the companies. they invested in. Well, I think you're right. I mean, if you look at, you know, pets.com was the poster child, right? For, you know, Web 1.0, how are you going to ship dog food? You know, the economics didn't make sense and they imploded. And now you look at chewy. Right.

And, you know, so fast forward to, you know, easier to standard technology, cloud, really looking at the funnel and unit economics, the infrastructure around shipping. I mean, it's working now. Yeah, Amazon, $1.5 trillion company, right? I mean, who would have known that the bookstore would have actually taken over the world, as it were? So Kevin and you, you go down to EA. You learn a lot there about video games. That's when, I guess you go to L.A., that's where E.A.'s headquartered was, right?

In Pliavista at that time? Started in Redwood City where their HQ is. Ah, right. And then did a couple of years down in LA. You know, in EA's a juggernaut today, E. It was, you know, the leading publisher when I was there. A lot more competition now and everything switched to mobile and online. But, I mean, I just learned an incredible amount at that place.

The rigor they put around launches, the size and scale of the revenue and the audience. That was really where I cut my teeth in how to run a business or at least part of a business at scale. with really smart people around me. I was more of a minion at Intel where I was in the late 90s, but EA is where I finally got a lot more responsibility and learned a ton that I brought with me until today. And you were responsible for marketing these games, which the marketing would be millions,

tens of millions of dollars in marketing at that time, and they would make tens of millions or low hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, a title? Well, I think the marketing, so usually the formula was around 10% of the, revenue would go toward marketing, you know, give or take. And so with Lord of the Rings franchise, I think we worldwide, we did a billion dollars or thereabouts because we had multiple titles and on multiple platforms. And so $100 million would not have been out of the realm of possibility for marketing there. Amazing. It's a hundred million dollar budget, but people don't

remember back then. There's no Facebook. I think Google might not even be taking ads. Maybe they're just starting to. So really you're buying print, television, and radio? Is that right? Or maybe AOL portal ads? So we did what we called the air war. There's a ground war and an air war. The ground war was talking to the community, doing PR, you know, things like that, which was much more limited than because you had like message ports. You didn't have Facebook. You didn't have all the methods that we have to talk to some of insiders. But the air war was where the action was at. And that was traditional advertising. So TV was the big lion's share of the marketing budget.

And then print ads like Game Informer PC Magazine. That was where you would have these beautiful, large, full-color ads. Multi-page, beautiful ads, back cover. Like these gatefold ads. Gorgeous. I used to sell them. Silicon Outer Reporter. I was in that business.

Yeah. I mean, and look, we've moved on. And the media is way more efficient and more engaging and more. interactive, but there was something about, you know, waiting for that magazine to show up in your mailbox. It's a great experience. This game. And it really added to the mystery because you didn't have all this information leaking on the web.

That's where you got your news and you got your reviews about games. And it invoked a lot of emotions, right? It was like a very powerful medium magazines. People forget the power of like looking at the table of contents or the back page or, you know, a particular column. column. It's really there's something lost in that art form. You know, I cut my teeth on magazines in the early days. So it's like vinyl. It's like it's like vinyl. Yeah. I also think if somebody started a magazine today about apps or startups or, you know, digital media, a magazine about digital media today that was a luxury product, like $30 a magazine, like the magazine books

trend in Japan where their keepsakes. I think it would do wonderful. I don't know if we could get to a million subs or 100,000 subs, like, you know, apps do all the time. But it certainly is fascinating when you think about that art form just going away. I know. Maybe it'll come back like vinyl. Maybe that could be something you dabble in. No, it's so painful. When we get back for this quick break, I want to get back to how you priced it.

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community that's part of this week at startups. It really means a lot to me. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right. Mike Mazur is here, the CEO of Big Sky Health. And Kevin, you know, Kevin Rose, a friend of the show, friend of mine, launched this zero fasting app back in the day. Mike took it over, got funding from my friend

Tony Conrad, who was also the investor in Fitbit, which watched up one of my events and a friend of mine as well. They backed it and they have a trio of products oak meditation, less, a mindful drinking app so you consume less alcohol and zero, which I think is

the tip of the spirit and the big one in this, which you should try and you should go pay for zero. It's called zero plus the paid product. What do you call it? Zero plus. Zero plus. Got it. And so how did you get the pricing?

You came to $70, like $7,000, like $6 a month, something like that when you pay by year. $9 a month, $70 a year. And we had a launch price of $49 a year for all of our existing users so they could come in. I got in on that. Good. I'm glad to hear that. Are you enjoying the product? I mean, yeah, I really, just on the advanced product, it wasn't what I wanted.

But I was delighted. I want to hear about that. Well, I emailed you early, I emailed Kevin early on and he caged you. What I want is I have a I message thread where me and my brother, who's lost 15 pounds fasting, and my other friend Mike Savino, who we invest together as a venture partner on my firm, we would just post our results from our fast and just kind of give each other encouragement. And then we would kind of drop off for a month. Then we get back on it.

And I want to have all three of the fasting circles synced so we can all do our are fast together and have like the Fit Pit Pitbit competition because there is a there is a section in Fitbit where I got into these challenges the challenges work week hustle weekend single day whatever and Peloton has that same dynamic it's not so much for competition I'm not trying to beat anybody support it's more chat it's yeah it's more for being in it together and like yeah when I would be a runner I would run with people who I was the slowest runner in the group but I ran my fastest times right which tells you something, right? Well, let's break a little news on the show.

Okay. What? Yeah. Breaking news. Drummer, please. We are very close to rolling out exactly what you're talking about. Oh, fantastic. With challenges and with your friends, you know, there'll be group challenges, but also

these kind of tighter social circle challenges. And my team has no idea I'm talking about this. but it's so on point with what you're looking for and what I'm looking for and what a ton of people are looking for that can't help myself. Yeah, do it. Will it be that are you going to do the thing where the circles are matched? So like, you know how Apple has the circles? Yeah. I would love to see like all of us on the same circle.

We'll be on the same circle with our pictures. You won't be on the same circle, but you'll see, you know, your circle versus your friend's circle. Perfect. And they'll be, initially we'll have. kind of preset challenges that we set up. Right. But then you'll be able to do custom bespoke challenges with you and your friends. So it's been on our roadmap forever.

You know, we know people want this more community. You know, you see the number of people fasting, but you want to actually interact with them and get that encouragement. So that is imminently coming. I love it. Thank you for breaking that.

And I understand why you went with the coach and the education piece first. Because I was going to Tim Ferrara, versus podcast or, you know, listen, I'm friends with Tim. I was texting with Tim asking him questions about fasting. So like, and he was like, you could read my books. And I was like, no, I'm friends with you, Tim. You just answer my goddamn questions on text. Like, why would I read your books? Like, aren't we friends? Just tell me what to do. He's like, I have like six chapters on this. I was like, when you ask me about angel investing, I answer the questions. I don't tell you read my book. But, you know, I kind of had to do my own research on it. And, you know, like a pop over

to Joe Rogan, pop over to Tim Ferriss. pop over to Kevin Rose's podcast. So I understand like you put it all in the app. That's kind of table stakes. But yeah, these challenges are going to make it go crazy. And of course, that's a premium feature.

So you'll, I think you'll convert the rest of the folks. And it's kind of an interesting, easy to pay for them. There'll be some for free too. Like we are very committed to democratizing this practice. And I think, you know,

going through what I went through my own experience with fasting, we just want a lot of people fasting. Got it. And, And then it's incumbent upon us to create real value, not bullshit. Like, you know, we try and trick you into upgrading, like real value for that paid tier. So some of these things will be free and some will be paid with enhancements. Yeah, I mean, if you, if the free basic, you know, like, hey, we're in a competition together or we're sharing our stats, that makes the product viral, right?

Which it is in viral now. So you get a little virality, which is good for you. That's word of mouth is our virality right now. Yeah. Nothing in the product. Nothing in there. I mean, literally I've turned 10 people onto the product just by saying, my brother, my friend Mike Savino, people on our team, because it is so great. And when you think about pricing, that was another thing I wanted to get out of you.

You know, the $70 a year, it's the exact price of an A-list title video game. It's half the price of a Netflix subscription. How do you think consumers think about this as best as you can tell? It's a phenomenal question and there's no perfect answer. For us, we went about a couple different ways. One, the easiest way for anyone developing a new app to launch is look in your category, so health and fitness in our case, and just look at your peers, look at your nearest neighbors and see who's having success and where they're pricing.

So that's like table stakes where you start. So calm, I think, is, you know, there's some analogs between fasting and meditation. We have content. Most of our competitors do not have content. So you kind of can start there. And then you look at also, you mentioned if you went to a dietitian, well, in our case, we have Dr. Peter Atia, who's architecting both the coach programs. He and his, actually, he and his team of like six or seven people have had a direct hand and will continue to have a direct hand in our coaching. algorithms, recording all of the content, all the knowledge they've amassed over their, you know, 100 plus aggregated years of knowledge. If you tried to become a patient of Peter,

which I don't think he's taking new patients, it's a lot of money, right? And so if we can take the greatest hits, kind of the 80% of what Peter, how Peter would onboard you into his practice from a, you know, fasting perspective, which is a big part of his practice, and kind of bottle that and give you that feedback loop and that content, like, you know, we're one percent of the cost. Way less than that. Yeah. No, I mean, he would be a lot of money to do a personal consultation. That's right.

So we try to anchor on, obviously we can't anchor on that. But that's, I think, the value exchange is if, and if people are sort of seeing that. And that's what Peter wanted. Peter wanted to scale himself. He can only see so many patients. He sees how powerful this intervention is for, metabolic health, for weight management, for cancer prevention, more and more is the science is showing. You know, what's that worth? And I think our users, they look at this as a lifestyle, not a diet.

So 75% of our users, we polled them. They say fasting is a lifestyle, but I want to learn way more about it. They're kind of predisposed to wanting to dig in. And 70 bucks a year, yeah, maybe it's the cost of a video game. This is a year of that knowledge that we're always improving upon. I think we're seeing in our metrics that it feels like the right price. And we're also running a ton of pricing experiment. So anyone out there who's grappling with this question like we did, we have a whole infrastructure around annual versus monthly pricing,

free trial, no free trial. And you can pretty quickly over, you know, we've been at this for eight weeks now, market, we're honing in pretty quickly on that economic curve of, you know, what people are willing to pay, what the lifetime value LTV is. But I think anchoring on your peers is probably the quickest shortcut to get to a pricing. Which is what Disney did, right? The business will tell you. Yeah, the business will tell you. And renewals will tell you next year. That's right. And every month we're getting renewal data. Yeah. I mean, selling monthly is just, I think, the worst idea because it's tough. Well, you know, I think putting the yearly price at two to three, the yearly price at one-third

of the monthly price is where people are going to get to because if you are forcing people to make a 12-time-a-year decision, it's too much cognitive overhead. It's too much cognitive overload. It makes people anxious. Whereas if you grossly underpriced it and they pay once a year, then when year two comes around and if they used it twice, it's fine, right? So I think that's the double-edged short of maximization of rapid. to you. And I think that's a very astute comment. And I think that we are, you know, we're really

anchoring toward that. I think right now we're around a half. We'll continue to play with our pricing where it's maybe a half or closer to a third of monthly. And the other dynamic is we know we're at the beginning. We're going to keep adding a ton of value to this product. We're not resting in our laurels. We have an entire year if someone subscribes annually to really just get them even more stoked when that annual subscription renews. And we also don't have Apple emailing you every month saying, okay, your monthly things are billing again. That's the cognitive overload that I can't handle. I just pay for everything yearly now. And I'm just like, the yearly is such a better value. And I encourage all our startups to just go with yearly because, and grossly underpriced it,

because there's so many users out there. If you look at what Apple, I'm sorry, Disney did to Netflix, I think the introductory price I paid for Disney was $7 a month. I think I got free with Verizon. You got a free with Verizon. Yeah. If they had said to me, you could buy it for five years at $7 a month, which would have been 60 months times seven, you know, I would have done it. I would have done it.

I would have paid the $450 or whatever it winds up being, you know, I would have just been like, yeah, I'll pay it for five years, like going to be watching Disney and Star Wars and Pixar films for the next five years. And that just takes, you think about the, the base. of users that com.com has and full disclosure we're investors in the company from the seed round. But we have a steazy, a dance company,

and we have FitBod, a fitness company, both doing it incredibly well. And I think if you look at their price- Do they not have monthly at all? Or they just charge? I think you have to offer monthly, but I think the pricing- is so attractive to go annual.

It's so attractive that you're like, ah, when it's four months, you know, so when it's 40 bucks or 50 bucks, I think for people, it's just such an easy decision to make it. If you use it twice, they get enough value. I actually subscribe to, I think, early on, like some video service for, like, foreign films.

Voodoo or something or video. I can't remember the name of it. Anyway, I'd signed up for it for a year, and I watched like two movies, and I was like, oh, paid for itself. Right. Even though it was. And Com, Com, you're an investor,

they have a lifetime skew. We've grappled. Yeah, I think it's their lifetime. $300? I think it's $300. Yeah, I remember when they sent that experiment, I was like, I just forwarded it to Alex, and I was like, brilliant. Because think about it, you can always turn it off when you hit a million of them. Right.

You know, that's right. Okay, yeah, the next nine million will pay. But there's, this is something special is going on here with consumer subscriptions where consumers are willing to pay for software again. What do you think is behind that? Well, I think the software has gotten materially better in, I mean, they've always been willing to pay for video games and that's content. I think in the health and fitness space, when I started at FitStar, production value is horrible.

And, you know, FitStar partly was a success because of our production values, which was a direct lineage back to my video game days where production value really mattered. I think the machine learning and AI

to serve up content that's relevant to you is also infinitely better. And I think users are finally getting value from these. I mean, I'm talking, specifically about health and fitness, but in general, if they're deriving, if they're driving value or having their life improve through these products, then I think the value exchange is 50 bucks a year, 60 bucks a year. I'm happy to pay it. And so that's, I think the most interesting

point, Mike, is that outcomes from phenomenal, I think you said really two really interesting things there. The first, I think people don't think about enough, which is the production value. you know, in video games, the artwork, the music, the voiceover, like, they really pull out all the stops. And they think of it like, because of the revenue numbers, like a major production, like a movie. Whereas in apps, people just think, what's the least I can spend? And that's my, you know, control costs. But outcomes is really the interesting thing because during COVID, what we saw was all the SaaS companies had this like 10%, 20% pullback. and it was a pullback, I think, like an acceleration.

I'm talking about business subscriptions of people who weren't getting the outcome. And COVID just made them look at their bills. Right. I'm just going to review my bills. I don't know how long. The stock market crashed. I don't know how long this is going to last. So let's do a quick audit.

Let's check the ledger. What can I turn off? And now I, with my teams, I put all of our SaaS billing onto like a credit card that has a cap. and that we can just turn off that one credit card, like they're burner cards, so that if we don't want to, if we want to stop paying for this particular product or these products, you just put the SaaS card at $1 a month.

I need a burner card in my personal life, too. Yeah, there's a bunch of companies. Do not pay, privacy.com. A bunch of them now exist. We can create these burner cards. And I think banks are going to wind up doing it. There's divvy for business that we tried. We've tried three or four of them.

And I don't have an endorsement yet. And nobody's sponsoring the program yet. So, but I think they all basically do the same thing, which is here's a card for you. And you can do it, you can do unlimited cards. So you could make a card just for your net subscription. So I did that for the first one I tested, it was the Wall Street Journal. You ever try to unsubscribe from the Wall Street Journal? Impossible.

Impossible. And I emailed Rupert Murdoch about it, like literally. I was like, you guys are taking my money. Sorry to make the guys laugh. I just emailed them and I was like, River, this thing doesn't make sense. to me like you take our money through a web form but you won't let us unsubscribe through a web form for security reasons because that's what the woman on the phone said to me. I said, can I ask you a stupid question? Why do I have to call you to unsubscribe when you'll take my

money? She said, oh, because of security reasons, obviously. I said, isn't unsubscribing more secure? Like that's less of a worry than being subscribed. And like dead silence. She goes, I just work here, sir. And I was like, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to turn to a Karen on the phone. But it seems like Apple's, that was the other thing people were saying was the subscription changes that Apple and giving more control to people and surfacing the subscriptions and sending that monthly billing was going to cause problems. And I think it's the opposite. It's built trust.

I think so, too. Apple really made that stuff opaque. I, you know, I'm obviously, you know, run a company. I'm heavily involved. I remember trying to tap through nine menus to. Yeah, what do you find it? Yeah, it's like your Apple ID and then you're down a rabbit hole. But I think that's important, right?

And like, I think the companies that are durable and that last, it's like they make it as easy to unsubscribe. And maybe they don't put in front of your face, but like don't try and trap someone. No. Don't be a cable company. Yeah. And I think that, you know, what did Rupert say?

Did you write back? He didn't. Okay. But you know, I'll tell you another time I pulled my celebrity card, my micro celebrity card, is my NBA league pass. Oh my God. Was disastrous in the first years. Yeah, I had disastrous billing.

And I said, hey, wait a second. I signed up. And then the billing went up like $100. So I emailed Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA. And I said, Adam, what's going on here? Like, I never agreed to this. And you raised my billing. And it doesn't work, by the way.

You're blocking out every Knicks game. This thing is not worth paying for unless I can get all my Nix games. Like, this is just too confused. using and you charge an extra 100 bucks from what I paid. And one of his people emailed me back and said, you have a two free year subscription. Adam appreciates the feedback. So that was kind of cool. That's cool.

Yeah, CEOs. I don't have those emails I can write. And I've been being double-billed somehow by Netflix for, I just checked my credit cards. Like I did what you said, going through my credit card stuff. I've been double-billed by Netflix for like 18 months. When we get back from this quick break, I'm going to tell you how to solve all your reoccurring credit card issues when we get back on this business. Hey, everybody, do you like modern furniture? I do. And I am in love with a company called Mobloft.

You may have heard of them. They make gorgeous, really well-built, elegant, but affordable modern furnishings. And I have one of their beautiful tables in my home. And then I have another table that was imported. And I get more compliments on the one that cost a fraction of the cost of the imported one from Italy. I kid you not. It is amazing. I love Modloft because these are built to last and they're beautiful and they're a fraction of the cost. And also Modloff offers a lot of cool services like risk-free at-home trials and they deliver in days, not months. We're team in stock. We're looking for stuff that's in stock so we can get it there. We don't want to wait six months. And their prices are spectacular. Even though they've won all these international design awards,

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Get in there. And go visit Modloft.com slash twist for 15%. sent off and free shipping. That's why founders, venture capitalists, pro athletes, and top recording artists all choose Modloft, including me. So thanks to Modloft for supporting this weekend startups and for making great products, candidly. I love the products. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right. Mike Mazur is here. Gosh, I mean, I literally need to have you on the show for like two hours because you've had such a career. Another way of saying, you're old and you got the scars.

We have 1.0, Web 2.0, we have 3.0, and now whatever we're in now, maybe it's just called business now. It doesn't need to be carved out. But we were talking about the reoccurring subscription hacks. It turns out when you cancel your credit card, they keep your number. So you, as a feature, and I don't know if it's a feature, you still get your bills, right? So if your credit card gets stolen and you read to your credit card, Yeah, yeah.

You know. I had this with Amex. So I lost my card, then they keep billing me. Yeah. So here's what you do. You cancel the card. You just cancel the card. And then you get a new card that has the ability to have burner cards.

And then you see who in the family or the company or you yourself what you miss. Because there's nothing on there that's a showstopper. And trust me, when you're on a subscription, when we did that with our SaaS bills, we got a lot of phone goals really fast. And I was like, oh, my God, somebody from the company bought this and we never looked at it. I think every company, if they're not using burner cards, should cancel all credit cards and start over every year. It should be part of the financial part. So you're getting-

So is a burner card like a certain type of card? Or you just allocate this Chase visa is going to be a burner card? No. You take your bank account. You connect it to the service. Okay. And then they say, here's a card number. Here's a card number.

Here's a card number. Give this card number a name. and I called it Wall Street Journal. And then I set it to $1. And then what I did was they'll let you change your card at Wall Street Journal. So I went to the Wall Street Journal. I changed my card to the burner. And then the very next month, I stopped getting built.

I need to call them on the phone. I need this. It works so well. I was like, oh, and I think this is going to become the standard is to put it. And this is what happens when you squeeze too tight. I think this is like one of the things people learn. You squeeze customers too tight. They come up with really interesting solutions like,

BitTorrent, you know, or Napster or, you know, do not call, right? We had the kid from Do Not Call on the pod. Yeah, that was a great episode. So you had a health scare and you're willing to talk about it. So let's go there. Let's talk about the health scare, how that introduced you to fasting, because I realize we haven't actually even talked about fasting itself and why this has become a trend. Now, we know that in our community, people are into the quantified self. And that started 10 years ago or 12 years ago with Fitbit and other things that you would clip to your belt and get your steps. So I don't think we need to talk about that piece. But fasting specifically, I saw my friend Phil Libben, who was fatter than me.

I mean, he was big. Well, he was 100 pounds. And I was like, Phil, what happened? And he said to me, fasting. This is three years ago. And I said, I'm so impressed. We have to go get coffee. We got egg bites at Starbucks, the suvite egg bites.

at Starbucks, the sousvite egg bites. And he said, here, let me explain to you all about fasting. And then I heard Kevin and Tim talk about it. So tell me about how you discovered fasting and why fasting is becoming a phenomenon. Yeah. So the short, shorter story of that is my road into fasting is very different, thankfully, than most people's. Most people get into it for kind of some kind of weight loss. That's a very common entry point, the most common entry point. My road was different. So when I was in the midst of selling FitStar to Fitbit, this is fall of 14, I've been feeling

really kind of ill, kind of like flu and fatigue and just not well at all. And the Fitbit deal was going through. And within a week of getting Fitbit's statement that they wanted to buy the company, He hadn't got a term sheet yet, but they said, we want to buy you. And they were serious because they've been looking at this for a while. A week later, I got diagnosed with nod, Hansen's lymphoma. Wow. Basically what I, you know, they couldn't figure out what was wrong with me.

They did an ultrasound. And they said, you've got lymphoma. And it looks like it's, you know, significant. And so I went through, I went to Stanford, amazing institution, had, you know, great conventional medicine. Very blessed to have that. But I didn't want to just go through the standard protocol without digging in and figuring out how I could be the best patient, how I could stack the deck in my favor with things that I

would do in my lifestyle while I'm going through treatment. And I came along the work of a guy named Dr. Walter Longo. He had done some very early work in applying fasting to mice that had cancer and were going through chemotherapy. And his hypothesis was, which is turned out to be true, if you. are in a fasted state, and we're talking multi-day fast, like five days, your cell is going to a mode called autophagy. It's like, here it is right. It's topogy cells itself, which is a protective state for your healthy cells. But the fast dividing cancer cells have one mission,

which is to take over the host, keep dividing. And so because your fasted cells slow down or a protected state, and the cancer cells are fast dividing and going fast, it creates a bigger differential for the chemotherapy to properly target the cancer cells. And that just made sense to me. I watched the YouTube video. It was like in his basement of USC in the school of gerontology. It was like this homegrown video. But of all the stuff that I looked at on my own, that was the one that made sense.

And I felt like there was very little downside. I wasn't emaciated. I had enough body mass to take on a fast if I had the discipline. And that's what I did. So I did five-day fast for each of my six chemo treatments. So 30 total days of fasting over about three or four months. So you ate nothing. You just drank liquids.

Water. Five days before ambulion, which is just beef. Salt. Yeah. No calories. Just electrolytes. So I would do two days before the treatment to get into that state of autophagy. Right.

the day of treatment so that the chemo could target the cancerous cells more effectively. And then two days after, so that when I introduced food, I wasn't creating any kind of a growth signal when my stem cells were being produced after that third day of fasting, which happens after a long fast. You get stem cells. So giving them a kind of a pure environment. And I'm sure I'm botching some of the science here, but that was the general gist. And I got, they did a scan, after two of the six, the first two of the six treatments, they do sort of a progress scan, a pet scan. And they had, they couldn't show any evidence of cancer. Whoa.

It had sort of begun into remission. Now, I went through the rest of the treatment because that's the playbook. And, you know, doctors stick with the playbook for a very good reason. But it was incredible. It was, you know, and also my, my response to the chemo fasting, because one time I broke early, My response to the chemo was much less kind of painful and nauseating when I did the fasting versus when I introduced food early in my treatment. So there's been studies for a long time. The science on calorie restriction is very clear that calorie restriction in mice and other folks or I don't even know if they've done human trials on this.

I don't know how you do a human trial. Biosphere 2. If you remember Biosphere 2 where the scientists went in Arizona and they sort of lived in a bubble for two years. They were all calorie restricted. Oh. There's some different opinions on calorie restriction, especially if it's sustainable from a lifestyle standpoint. And the nice thing about fasting and the reason. So that was my introduction.

And I thought then I went nerded out on the lifestyle benefits, the metabolic benefits. What are those? Take us through each of those. Sure. So and this is really what we've been working on with Peter. So the most clear one is, is really managing your levels of glucose. And if you're pre-diabatic, meaning if you have a glucose that's between, I think, 100 and 150, you know, when you do a finger-prick or you go to the doctor, you know, you can be in a pre-diabetic state. And if you don't make lifestyle changes, that can turn into type 2 diabetes. So there's really compelling evidence that fasting manages down your glucose on a sustained basis. So that's one clear benefit. There's a lot of science emerging around coronary disease

and also around Alzheimer's and cognitive decline. So what Peter Atia calls the Four Horseman, which is cancer, coronary disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer's. You know, he's a firm believer in the sciences showing that fasting can really accrue to be preventative or at least help you if you have them in those maladies. Which is fascinating, makes directional sense. And we have thousands of users, Jason, that have told us that they have reversed their type two diabetes using zero and fattenance. Now, we're a consumer-grade app. We're not a medical-grade app. Everyone taking this on should

consult with a doctor in any regard, especially if they have type of diabetes. But thousands of these people have told us they reversed their type-to-diabetes. Yeah, which people have talked about that for a long time. And the willpower is the issue. So what are your thoughts on willpower in relation to this? And do you think about that in terms of the app design? I'm certain you do. We do. I mean, we try to, you know, we try not to push people beyond what you know, it's a fine line between discomfort and pushing through that discomfort and truly listening to your body on when to stop. But the willpower game is really one, I think, with fasting, and you've probably discovered this for yourself. The diets for the last 50 years

have been, you know, what to eat, right? There's a lot of religion on paleo versus keto versus the South Beach diet. And you're sort of all day, like trying to figure out, what levers to pull and what you can eat and what you can eat. It just gets very overwhelming and complicated. That depletes willpower and discipline. Yes. The magic of fasting, which is the when, because it's so binary, once you build up a little bit of a muscle for fasting, it actually becomes super easy. You just don't eat in this window. There's no decision fatigue. And then you set your goal of maybe at 16 hours, maybe it's 36 hours, and you just know when you can eat again. And I think that's the biggest unlock.

That was the unlock for me. I lost like 15 pounds doing it. And it was just, and then I came back a little bit and I'm going to get back on it. But for me, it was really simple. Stop eating at 6 and then eat again at 10 a.m. Not the end of the world, right? Because if you think about it, some number of those hours, some number of those 16 hours, I'm asleep.

So I'm asleep for half those hours or so. So that's not hard. So you're really talking about just not eating for eight hours. And when you put a plate food in front of me, well, that's a really hard decision for me. I just want to eat everything. I love food. I'm going to go to the, like here's the perfect example.

When I fly, when I used to fly, I don't know when I'll fly. Right. I don't know when I fly again. When I would fly to the East Coast, I used to like, you know, eat the crap. They bring the stuff around. So I eat the cookies. So I eat the cookies.

Oh, hog and doth. Gossus common. Oh, I know you're in American business. I know they got the fresh baked cookies. You just, you gave it up. You're in business class. It's okay to say. Yeah. Well, they eat whatever they brought to me. But they get specifically American, they put those fresh baked cookies out and they always have two or three eggs. You're United. You're United. What is United? United does the Sundays? They do Sunday? If you make it into, if you get the bump to first class, they have the cookies in the Sundays. Got it. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. I thought everybody got those. No. No. In the back. No. In the back. can get the peanuts. I got the peanuts. For most of my life. Yeah. Stop that too.

But I just, I just said on this trip, I'm just on this flight and the pre-flight and the post-flight, I'm just going to fast. Right. And so it took all the, it. And I used to feel like shit, right? Because I would, you know, eat the junk. And then there'd be a, you know, maybe there'd be a drink or two. And you'd get to your destination.

You just feel horrible. And so I just started fasting. And it's a game changer. Yeah, such a game changer. Tell me about M&A. You had a great experience, I think, when Fitzstar sold, correct? That would be a good outcome between good and great. Good and great, especially circumstantially because I was, you know, I was being treated with cancer and the Fitbit team and the true team who are obviously on the board of Fitbit.

They, they... That's a material. That's a material. You have to disclose that. Oh, yeah. You were in the middle of the deal and had to tell them, hey, the founders got cancer. Dude, I was sitting in my, you know, hospital bed, getting jacked up with chemo, doing red lines on the term sheet. And then I had to figure out the right moment to tell them, which was right after that.

And I, yeah, I had to disclose it. And I was, look, you're already, a hundred thousand percent. Yeah. I was dealing with cancer, possibly dying. And the deal died. Yeah. I ended up having stage four, I figured out. So I was stage four.

Whoa. And I thought this is going to destroy the deal. Yeah. So like imagine my mental state at that time. And those got, I mean, you know, I guess a ton of bad luck got followed by a ton of good luck. And the deal went through and they, they supported me through it. That's fantastic. You know, I don't know if you've read Bob Eiger's book, Ride of a Lifetime.

And we're trying to get Bob on the podcast. I think he's going to come on. And he tells the story of Steve Jobs telling him right before Pixar was being announced, like the day before, hey, I got to tell you something in confidence. My cancer's back. And Steve and Robert Eager is left in this crazy situation because he promised Steve Jobs. Yeah, no, I won't tell anybody. It's like only my doctor, my wife, and you know Bob Eager.

So Bob's left with this choice of do this is material information, but that are the largest shareholder of Disney post this acquisition is going to be Steve Jobs or his estate. Do we tell everybody? I think where they wound it up, they didn't. Which means if the Pixar deal went south, you would have this material piece of information hanging out there that could be actionable, right? If they if they thought jobs was the key employee. I didn't realize it was kept, you know, on the down. I believe it was. Somebody fact-check me, but the book is not super clear,

but I think he just decided it wasn't his place to tell everybody. Or maybe he, yeah, no, I think he didn't tell everybody. So it's crazy. I knew that James Park would have to, you know, digest it for himself, make his own analysis and talk to the board. But I, you know, I was 99% convinced it was. Yeah. It was going to, it was going to.

And then, and I, how could I fundraise? I mean, it was like, it would have been. the company because yeah what's that what's that like being in your 40s and you get that diagnosis and you go home on that weekend and you're with yourself like what is that what do you know about life that we don't having had that experience yeah um a lot of things i mean it's going to sound incredibly trite um but i i just really appreciate every day and i think think, but it manifests in real ways. You know, when I set up this company, I said,

if the only way I can start another company is I've got to have tons of balance. I've got to live where I want to live. So I live in Montana now, not the craziness of San Francisco. I don't want to go into an office every day because that stresses me out. So I set up the company from day one to be distributed. I set my life. I was very intentional about how I was going to be the healthiest. mentally and physically I could be in running another company. And that's turned out to be

a blessing on many levels, but really putting myself first, not not, and that sounds selfish, but it's really just part of that appreciation of being alive, just wanting to be alive and thrive and then make my contribution in the world. And I think that that was brought home by this whole experience, along with a bunch of other stuff. Yeah, that that is, I think, very instructive that people don't realize the journey is all you have at the end of the day. And we get very focused on the outcome of the startup, of the fast. And you know, you have to enjoy the fast as well as the outcome that you're looking for. That's right. Enjoy the process. And I think that's what people get addicted to fasting when you think about it is the lifestyle. What I hear

universally from people is I've recaptured, you know, two hours a day of my time because I'm not spending it, you know, eating. You get back like an hour or two a day, which is, Oh my God. Your efficiency and your time unlock is, it's hard to explain to someone that hasn't tried it. But just getting back to that point about what I appreciate. Yeah. And I guess maybe instructive for, you know, I hope no one has to go through this journey to get to that place where they're kind of making decisions that don't compromise their health or their happiness. But, you know, to give a shout out to Tony Conrad.

When I first went to him, I wasn't sure I wanted to do this. I still had a lot of scar tissue from what I called, I told him, I used to redline every day at FitStar. I was like stressed, neurotic, wasn't sleeping. And I knew I can't redline like that again. I can do it for, you know, a few seconds, but I can't, I can't sustain that. And I almost dared Tony not to invest. I said, Tony, I'm not going to have an office. I'm going to split time between San Francisco and Montana.

And ultimately, I just moved to Montana. I may sell this thing for like $10 million or nothing, which would be sort of a wash up for you or I might go the long run. Like I couldn't give him any, like all the things that I said to get my round of funding at FitStar, all the promises, all the, I just threw that all at the window and just said, here's what I need to be successful.

Right. And if you can't invest, I totally get it. And he, I think, appreciated so much that, A, I knew what I wanted.

Like I was very deliberate. with what my ask was and that I made the ask, that I was transparent and honest with him. I think that probably ultimately made it an easier decision for him. I think ultimately what we're realizing in the startup game is that, you know, experienced third, fourth, fifth time, you know, at the rodeo folks, they don't need to expend as much energy or time

to get the same result as a first timer. So you will have, this is my case. Yeah, I mean, your ability to focus and to block out and delegate what is not essential. And pattern recognition has been big too. It's huge. Like this time around, your ability to say no to shiny new objects and distractions compared to what you're starting. Isn't it? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I used to spend so much time on shiny objects and like spending tons of time with companies that were sniffing around like Nike, oh, Nike's sniffing around. We spent hundreds of hours, you know, nothing against Nike, but that was just my own naivete. This time, we're like zoomed in. And when you're zoomed in, ultimately at a startup, what is that zooming in best spent on? So when we talk about efficiency like Michael Jordan or Vince Carter or whatever older athlete in their, you know, last, on their last startup, on their last championship run, you see them be more efficient, you know, and careful with their body.

They train more. what are those things that you train more on and you're just more dialed into in terms of what matters? I think it's very episodic and very company dependent. But for, you know, I think for us and for me, it's been what, you know, what is the, you know, the P1, P2, P3 of what we need to do to get to the next chapter of growth or next phase of growth and really being much better at saying no to things that opportunistically come in, which is very exciting to see that stuff coming in. And you're wondering if you're going to miss it. But for us, I'll give you an example. In January, you know, we were getting ready to launch zero plus. And we had a bunch of other partnership

stuff coming in and investment interest. And we just said as a team like nothing else matters, but getting this product out the door at quality flawlessly. And so it just, it's kind of like fasting, right? Yeah. It was binary. It was like, product. This is what we had. This is what we had to the product. Operations product. Yeah. That was everything. At our stage of a company, that's everything. Now that we have this product out there and we're getting product market fit and revenue, now the game changes. Now those external partnerships and growth are important. So we're reprioritizing. And we just went through OKRs. I've never done OKRs with any of my companies setting objectives and key results. Those are very instructive on every quarter were sort of

what are the focus points. I know you had 155. The 155 CEO on, we used that tool for OKRs, and that's been a great tool for us. Early and continued investors. Love it. I've invested in David's story, he's been on the podcast a couple of times. It was one of these startups. I put a small amount of money in when I was starting as an angel, then put a little bit more in because the curve was steepening.

And then somewhere in year four or five, the thing went, whoop. And the market was ready for it. And they were ready for the market. And the OKR's features got dialed in. We love it. It was really for employee feedback. originally. Yeah.

How are you doing at work? Yeah. And I was like, you know. And now we have it for reviews. It's efficient and great. That's when I think it became essential, right? And I think like for different users, different pieces are essential.

That's what's really interesting about like for me, the challenges and the community will be interesting because I already, you know, watched enough videos on it. Let's talk a little bit about M&A. You were famously at Dig when my friend Jay Adelson was in the process. of selling the company. This has all come out since. The company was going to get bought for $100 million, I believe by Marissa Mayer at Google. Google was getting inquisitive about Web 2.0 wanting to buy things. And they pulled out of the deal in the last moment. Tell everybody the story of them pulling out of the deal, why you think they did and ultimately, you know, what you

learned from the dig experience. Yeah. Well, you're pulling out all the, all the stops. I left until minute 60. You know, I basically left your cancer diagnosis and the dig, all the fun stuff at the end. Always in the third act because you know what? We've talked for a little while. We built up a little mutual trust and we know each other. And it feels like now we can. Yeah, no one else is listening. Yeah. We've checked all the boxes about the other stuff going on. So let's get real here and have like, what's that moment like? Because you, that was a big number.

in Web 2.0. People think 100 million now and they're just like, whatever. Remember, 100 million. This is when houses in Noe Valley cost 600,000. So this was life-changing money in a major way. That's right. And Google had, they were just getting started buying stuff. Take us through the stuff. Yeah. And Marissa Meyer, you know, she she was, I think, running product at that point. I don't know exactly. Correct. Correct. role VP of product. And I think that she had seen what was happening with Facebook. She saw what was happening with Twitter. And I think they wanted to make a run in social media. And so I'm not sure

if they selected like the laser focused on this from the beginning. And I wasn't at the board level. I wasn't privy to all of the way this manifest. But I think she became, you know, she had a hypothesis that this new way of organizing data through the lens of humans, and they were doing Google News at that time, that was kind of a big initiative for them. How could you kind of blend Google News and dig to make something that was innovative in next gen? I didn't realize that that's what they were thinking was.

Yeah, it would go on Google News. It was all about, it was very connected to Google News. So, you know, they, again, I wasn't, Jay was handling the conversations with Google, but everything was going well. We had board approval, apparently. The offer was made. The offer was made. They interviewed all the employees.

I mean, they had all the employees. We're talking about 11th, not the 11th hour, the 11th and 55th minute. Yeah. Of the 11th hour. And Word has it. I don't know if this is the truth is that it was either Larry or Sergei, you know, it came across their desk. somehow in a way that was new to them or some detail hadn't been properly communicated.

And they just basically overruled on the deal. Yeah. And so this is why you always got to deal with the top person. If you're doing M&A, you're always got to be deal with the top person so you don't get the surprise. If you possibly can. You need the rabbi. You need the consigliari.

You need that champion. But you also need to have. the top bought in from the beginning or something like this could happen. Yeah. And for me, I mean, I've talked about this. That was one of the most instructive pieces for me on any kind of deal. M&A fundraising. An important commercial deal is, I mean, it is not done until the ink is dry and the money's in the bank.

100. You just have to not count on it happening because you don't know what's going to side swipe. It could be COVID. It could be a miscommunication in the other company. I had another situation with fundraising, M&A at Fitzstar, which I can't talk about because it's under NDA, where at the 11th hour, literally the 1159, they pulled a term sheet. That is crazy. Yeah, I mean, it just is very instructive for founders. Listen, Mike, I've taken enough of your time.

Everybody out there. It was fun. Yeah, I mean, I could go for another hour, but we've gone well over an hour now. Everybody go get zero fasting right now. Pay for it. It's worth it. It's life-changing. Even if you just want to dabble, I highly recommend it.

I think as a lifestyle change, I've been kind of going on and off of it, but I've had a 100-day street was my longest fast-dust streak. But, you know, I kept that at the 16-hour. I think that might be longer than me as my longest-street. I just like the idea on a lifestyle basis because my weakness is the quantity of food I eat, the inability to make good decisions about the food I eat, and this late-night stress eating and it just checked off all those boxes for me. And so I think it'll check off a lot for you if you're listening. And zero is the leading app. Go check it out now. And if you're having too many

beverages, you know, you may want to check out less. No judgments there. And Oak, if you want to be mindful, you know, and you know, after you pay for your comm, you can go get oak. But just so in case the at the com. Coke is free. Okay, no problem. So you don't have to choose. You can you can dabble in oak. But yeah, continued success. Thanks for coming on the pod. Everybody go check out. Zero fasting.

Seriously, you can get a lot out of it. See you all next time. Bye-bye.