This Week in Startups - E1097: Understanding the travel collapse & how media can thrive going forward with Skift CEO & Founder Rafat Ali

Episode Date: August 18, 2020

Check out Skift: https://skift.com Follow Rafat: https://twitter.com/rafat Follow Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis Thanks to our partners... LinkedIn Jobs - Get a $50 credit toward your first job post at https://www.linkedin.com/twist Squarespace - save 10% by using code TWIST at https://www.squarespace.com

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 $50 off your first job post at LinkedIn.com slash twist. And Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website. site or domain.

Hey, everybody. It's your boy, J-Cal. I hope everybody's doing well. It is the year of the pandemic. And it's August of 2020. And I have been in quarantine since March 12th when I self-quarantine. And it's been over 100 days. It's been a bit of a challenge for me. I'll be totally honest with the audience. You know me as a highly social person. I did a back of the envelope and I realized I would travel internationally four or five times a year. I traveled domestically. somewhere between like, I don't know, 10, 12. In other words, I was on the road a week a month and meeting people around the world. And I've been doing that since I was in my early 20s when I started my first magazines.

First one was called Cyber Surfer, did five issues with Starlog, got into a big legal battle. That's for another day. Then I started a little pamphlet called Silicon Allie Reporter, which is paper, 16-page photocopy. And I was 24, 25 years old. And the internet happened. And I started covering the internet the year that the World Wide Web existed.

And I had no money. And so I put it all on my credit cards. Visa and American Express were my first investors. Visa was quite reasonable as an investor. They would let me pay whatever I could back to them in dividends. American Express, they were a little more hardcore. They wanted it all back the next month. But that discipline kind of helped me.

And in the first couple issues of the magazine, I would take the photos, write the stories, edit it, and sell the advertising, and then deliver the 16-page photocopy, a literal 16-page photocopy. And after five or six issues, it hit $50,000 to $100,000 in revenue and was a color glossy. And I became in New York City famous in the media space because magazines were, magazines were what it was about. Those were the startups. And there was David Mays with the source, and David and Kim over at Paper Magazine, and I had the Silicon Alley reporter. And it made you quite a celebrity. I wound up on the cover of the New York Times, and wound up on Charlie Rose and countless other programs. It was a great run. And perhaps what I'm most proud about is that the alumni of that organization saw me,

fumble as an entrepreneur. They saw me try to figure it out in real time, but some of them took notes and went on to great things. There was a kid named Will Leach who lasted, I don't know, six months a year, maybe two. I can't remember. And then he started something called Deadspin. Then there was this young woman named Shenny Jardin, who did our conferences, and then she did Boing Boing.

And some guy who was an adjunct professor named Clay Shirky asked me if he could write a column. I'd edit that column and I couldn't figure out what the heck it was talking about because I didn't know half the words. I literally had a dictionary on my desk. And then Rafit Ali was sitting at a desk. And there was a big sign above his head, blinking, winner, winner, winner. And that's when I realized I knew talent. I had a knack for who is going to be successful in life. You know, you start to figure out what your superpower is as you get older and you can reflect

on decades of work. And if there is anything that I have as a superpower, it's knowing who's talented and who's going to succeed in life. And today, I'm really excited to have Rafit Ali, who went on to be CEO of two companies that he started himself after working for me for a brief time. Raffet is now the CEO and founder of a product called Skift, S-K-I-F-T-T-com. I'm lucky to be a modest angel investor in it, but I'm really lucky to call him a lifelong friend and somebody who it has been my pleasure, really sincerely, to watch grow into a tremendous entrepreneur who,

now when I talk to him, I take notes. Rafat, how are you doing? Welcome back to this week and startup. Last time you were on was episode 370 back in June of 20. 2013 on our news round table, but we've had dinner a couple times when I'm in New York. It's good to see you. How are you doing? Good, good. Thank you, Jason. You've also been a lifelong supporter of me, so thank you for that. I've learned tons from you as it was, I think it was a year maybe or maybe a year and a half that I worked for you back then.

Yeah. But I learned all kinds of stuff with you, in fact. I mean, you know all the stories, obviously. Yeah. You were at ins, were you at inside.com before or after that? I was there before. The story you may and may not remember is we shut down right after 9-11. The company was not doing well before 9-11. And it shut down right after 9-11, I think like October or something. And I emailed you because I'd seen a job in what was your newsletter called Silicon Allie Daily.

And we had an email newsletter that went with the print magazine called Silicon Allie Daily in addition to Silicon Alley-Reployer. Correct. which predated all the email newsletter craze that there is today, obviously. And in it was a job that may have been open, may have been closed. And I emailed you saying, hey, is that job still open? And I think you and I had talked because I had quoted you as a source in some of the stories that I did forinside.com. And you said, I don't know if it's open, but come and meet me. And I went and met you.

And we had a very good conversation. And then I came back and I said, I don't know if you're going to hire me, but just hire me for two months. If you don't like me, fire me after that. What did I say? And you said, okay, come join Monday. That sounds like me. And so it was, I think it really was a Friday that I went and met you. So it's probably the fastest person to get a job out of all the people that were laid off from

inside.com when we shut down. And I was like the lowliest of lowest intern there. There was two great things at that time. One, I didn't know what I was doing. So I literally did not know how to assess talent other than, is this person motivated? Like, do they want to win? I kind of knew that was important, but there was no startup, playbook, culture, handbook. I've had to run businesses back then, if you remember, like, you know, there might have been a book like good to grade or something or, you know, maybe you went to Stanford and they taught you that stuff.

But there wasn't like the startup, there weren't a thousand episodes of this week in startups or Y Combinator or any number of blog. So I was trying to figure it out. And I also had no money. And so I was like, how's $600 a week? I mean, what were the salaries back then in the 90s, 96, 97, 80? Well, for me, it was 30 grand, 40 grand? No, it was less than that. Yeah, close to that, $25,000 to $30,000 a year.

Yeah, back then, if you were in media and you could get a five or $600 a week job, you could get a place in Brooklyn or the boroughs for what? Five, $600 bucks for a month, yeah, room share, correct. That's what I had $500 a year. I was living in an inward, which is uptown Manhattan. Yeah. And so you basically could survive if you could get one of these jobs, but it was not easy to get.

Unemployment was high back in the early 90s for people coming out of school. What else do you remember? I'm just curious because I'm sure, you know, a lot of people who listen to this podcast have no idea that I had Silicon Allie Reporter and I did that for whatever six or seven years. Yeah, now they think Silicon Alley Reporter is business insider because it used to be called Silicon Alley Insider before. People are literally like, oh, and the founder of Silicon Alley Insider is on the program.

I'm like, no, reporter, but Henry Blodgik copied the name and Kevin, Ryan, and they asked me if it was okay. And they offered me 5% of the business. And I said, you know what? It's better you guys just do it on your own. I don't like to look backwards. And if I'm involved, they're going to just think it's Silicon Allie Reporter. And I kind of close that chapter.

Do your own thing. You're like, you're sure because were you calling it Silicon Allie Insider? And we don't want to like mess it up. But when you look back at that time, it's such a blur to me sometimes that the people who work for me remember how I was as a boss or a manager. So take a second and think if you can. Do you really want to go down the path of talking about how you were as a boss? I kind of do only because I'm 49 years old and I know I was a maniac.

And I tell people I was a bit of a maniac because I wanted to win so badly. You're just nodding your head. But I was crazy, right? I'd like yell and scream at people, or I was like, we would try to put the episode to bed. I said, nobody's leaving the office until this is done. And we'd be there until 5 in the morning. Those were like some of the moments. And when you had a print magazine, right?

Yeah. I mean, let's just say you're settling down with kids had a very good effect in you. Was I, do you look at that time and say, look at it and say that was a formative time for you? Of course, yeah. Look, I learned a lot from you. I learned you and Brian Alvey, who was your business partner or your CTO or your... Back that, he was just a CTO. He became my business partner on Weblogs, Inc. Right.

Right. So I learned the power of email, which is the direct contact from users, the daily, the dailiness of email, which was, remember, when I joined, I think the magazine was either about to shut down or had just shut down. Yeah. And the daily went on for a while, and then you launched Venture Reporter, which was a magazine covering the venture world. And so I learned the power of the dailiness of media, the rigor of like, come what may I have to produce.

And that created a discipline in you that when I took to blogging, it sort of was natural because you just had to produce. Right. Actually doing work every day. The consistency of effort. And so, you know, I talk a lot now 20 years later about consistency. So like showing up every day and producing. And, you know, turned out in media that's going to take you far if you show up every day because that that already puts you ahead of so many other people. Who are spirty in their work effort.

They might be like almost bipolar in the way they work. They have this like great two-week flow and then they're gone for a month. And then media generally seems to be like people seem to think it's like a cool place to be versus it's a slot that is in there for the long haul. So they underestimate that, huh, young people, that you're going to have to actually produce every day as a bit. opposed to like, ah, you know, I'm here to like... I mean, it's a cool thing to, right? Media startup. I have a media startup. I'm going to get funding. I'm going to be on the scene. It's not that different from 25 years ago, as you said,

a lot of people started magazines to be in the scene, right? Right. That's interesting. All right, when we get back from this break, Ruffet decided to start a company called skiff.com. And as I said earlier, put a little bit of money into a very modest investors. And he's been very judicious in raising a small amount of money and focused on revenue and being profitable. But imagine you're in a pandemic with an event-based business, because a lot of skiffs revenue came from events, and you had to pick the worst possible industry to be covering during a pandemic, the one hit hardest travel. Well, Skift, which you can go take a look at,

SKIFT.com, is a travel industry business to business, newsletter events, and subscription business. and we're going to talk about how Raffet has saved his business, is in the process of reimagining his business, and what he's learned, and what he's learned about travel media and what's the future of travel post-pandemic when we get back on This Week in Startups. Come on, you all know LinkedIn Jobs is the way to find great talent,

but I wanted to read for you today an amazing customer testimonial from somebody who's a member of the This Week in Startups audience. is Aaron, and he is the founder and CEO of MAAI, and this is a startup that uses artificial intelligence to optimize travel time on your work schedule. Sounds like a pretty good idea to me. Well, Aaron recently hired a machine learning engineer, and they started in July, and they have hit the ground running, and they are making things happen at his company. He received 110 relevant applications in four days, and he got great value. That is what.

why LinkedIn jobs is the number one way to hire. I tell all my startups, start with LinkedIn jobs, and then you're not going to need to do anything else because LinkedIn has hundreds of millions of members, 690 million people worldwide. Your company is only going to go as far as the talent you are able to recruit. And the greatest recruiting tool on the planet right now is LinkedIn jobs. And you can put your job in front of qualified members, every day. So it's seen by people who are looking for jobs like the one you have. So here is your call to action. Let me give you $50 right now. I'm going to give you the 50.com slash unicorn. You know, like the company you're going to build that's going to be worth of a billion dollars.

Well, we're going to start by finding you some amazing talent and it's on me. I'm going to give you by visiting LinkedIn.com slash twist. That's right, a fitting for you. LinkedIn.com slash twist to get the Fitty. Take the 50 right now. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. I'm walking down memory lane with Raffaulah Lee from Skift. You may have known him his previous company, paycontent.org.

He wound up selling that to the Guardian. I'm correct, correct, yeah. And at some point, you became in possession of inside.com. Did you not? Yeah, I bought Inside.com from some domain or Northern Ireland. What did you pay for it? I never asked you that. Do you remember?

$10,000. remember right and I got it from the Guardian after you sold to them I called them like for years and I wound up buying it for 60 and it's a million dollar demand and obviously I'm working on an email newsletter here we are but tell me about the what your initial idea was for skift and how amazing a year you had in 2019 to the extent you're willing to talk about it yeah I'm happy to Let us a profile of, because I think 2019 was year four or five of Skift, am I right? No, it was year six. Year seven, seven, seven.

Okay, yeah. So you started as a newsletter and you just slowly built this thing up. You get to year seven. 2019 was such a great year. It was a very good year. And so we were going to grow 40% top line this year, 2020. And so that was mainly on the back of events, as you mentioned. Events was a big part of our business.

40% of our business was events. And so, you know, Skift is the Bloomberg of Travel, so the shortest way to understand, news, research, data, conferences, conferences, marketing services for the global travel industry. By many accounts, one of the world's largest industries that, of course, in the pandemic, as you said, was in the bullseye as any industry can be. We ended the year with about 60 people. We were hiring about six people as of Feb. So early on, we were hiring. So that's, you know, 10%. growth in in staff for us as an as a primarily bootstrap company was was was a big number and

I mean you've raised I think low millions three million yeah we've raised three million we were going to do 17 this year and 17 million in revenue correct and we were going to do a couple of million in EBITDA my lawyer you realize the the the student has now become the master the peak for silicon alley reporter in year eight or nine was 11.6 million six million of which came from events and 5 million from the magazine and email newsletter. Yeah, and so we were on a path to be 25 million, which was sort of a milestone number, maybe in 18 months after that.

On only 3 million raised, Raffett, that's unbelievably efficient. It's just literally mind-boggling how capital-efficient you've been on this business. What is the secret to hitting those revenue numbers with such a small amount of capital? I mean, I see people, just to be honest, raise 17 million and get to 3 million a year in revenue.

The opposite of what you just did. Yeah, but I mean, look, we are, we took a while to get to 17. The types of businesses you invested in the software part of the world have a very high growth trajectory. And so for us, it was about like eat what you kill, I guess, whatever, the Zuckerberg. I guess you don't use that name anymore. But, no, I think it's fine. Eat what you kill, yeah.

No, I mean, you're basically a hunter-gatherer. I mean, if you can go find food, you get to eat. If you don't find food, you don't eat. And so it's quite a motivator. Yeah, and I think one of the things that people don't understand about B2B, like I say, oh, if you come up with this one thing in software, and if that scales, that's the biggest thing. In B2B, you have to basically bring everything along.

So it's not just subscriptions, it's events, it's advertising. And advertising for us means brand of content. So you bring all of these things along. So there's not one magic bullet in general in B2B. and it certainly makes it harder and more inefficient. You know, one of the things that is the silver lining, and we can go into this, that will come out of the pandemic. And the cost we're getting higher and higher for us as a business, being based in New York. This is probably true for all of your companies that you have been speaking to or you are investing in.

But now, ironically, sort of 25 years into the internet that you and I have spent, finally, it feels like, the world is going to open up when the world becomes normal, meaning we've become a remote company completely. We gave up our office. In fact, July 31st was our last day. Wow. That was one of the most proud moments I had. I have so many proud moments.

I don't mean to be like patriarchal here or take any credit for your incredible success. But when I came to visit you in your office like two years ago and I walked in and I just saw. office. I came to that office and we sat and had coffee with you and tea with some of the team. And I just had this flashback to like the good old days when we were doing that at Silicon Valley Reporter. And you were in one of those great loft buildings in New York and everybody's open desks and, you know, hang out areas in a dirty kitchen, coffee cups in the sink, mugs. You know, just people grinding it out at their desks. It was just like a great. Are you saying you're moving back to New York? You know, I, no. I mean, I have an agreement. with my spouse,

I'm going to buy those nicks and I'm going to work another 10 years. I'm 49 now. I think you're 10 years behind me. You're 39? No. Are you kidding? I'm three years behind you.

You're only three years behind me? Oh, okay. For some reason I always looked at you as a kid. I forgot, you know, we were all so young at the same time. So when I was probably like 29, you were 25 or 6 when you worked for me, which was weird in and of itself, like being a 26-year-old with 75,

for 100 employees. This is really weird. But I just had this, like, incredible problem with it. But I told Jade, like, listen, I'm going to work another 10 years. All I got to do is hit, like, four more Ubers only. And then I got to syndicate.com. I'm going to build a syndicate to buy the Knicks and bring a championship to New York when I'm in my 60s. That's my final act.

That's all I'm working for right now, aside from family. Like, literally, all of this is just to buy the Knicks and bring a championship to New York. So that would be the condition underage. But you had incredible luck, as I read in your email, your investor updates, which were fabulous. Yeah, so in terms of survival. So it hit us in Q1, which was a trifecta of unfortunate things, which was Q1 is our lowest cash flow quarter. Events is a big part of our business. We were in the travel industry.

It couldn't be worse than all three. I think sometime in March, we were probably... three weeks to four weeks money left in the company. Ooh! And so I've always had this list of people in my back pocket, and it's actually Google Talk, of people that I will call to say, hey, the company's going down, can you, can you,

you want the company, it's yours, please save these jobs. I've always had this in my back pocket. Right. Media people who could, you could call a Jim Bankoff, you could call a BuzzFeed, you could call a B-to-B person, and Henry Blige and I got you. Yeah. So I didn't call any of them,

but I certainly refreshed that list. And we got lucky. So we became the case study of why the small business loan, the PPP loan, however hard it was, meaning its rollout was completely screwed and all kinds of issues came, all the stuff that I'm sure you saw or read or something. Yeah, and my portfolio companies all over the place, yeah.

All over. Massive confusion. Like we didn't know how to apply. Nobody knew, it's the first time the government's ever done anything like this. I mean, they were shipping a quarter billion dollars or $500 billion, and nobody knew who could apply if you had to pay it back, if you were personally liable. Nobody understood anything. The rules were completely kept changing.

Even until now they keep changing the rules and how to pay it back, for instance. So we got it in the end. So that really saved a bunch of jobs. We unfortunately had to put one third of our team on furlough. Okay. We did that early on. We were early only because we were in travel as soon as China got hit. And because Chinese travelers are such a big force in the global industry,

every micro movement of Chinese travelers is watched very closely by us and other people and travel. So you had an early warning system. So when you saw... Probably like a month, month head up. So basically, you know, second, third, fourth week of January, you're covering the pandemic, I'm assuming. January 21st was our first story that we did on the pandemic.

And it was China. we thought it was going to be bad for travel industry, didn't realize it was going to be a worldwide global pandemic, obviously, at that point. So we put a hiring freeze early February. So we were hiring six people. We put that. It wasn't, was a little bit of pain in the company.

It's like, why is this happening? Why is Skip doing this, you know, internally? And so, and then it became obviously very apparent. So by mid-March, we had put about one third of our team on furlough. And unfortunately, two months after that,

we had to let them go. So we're about 40 people now compared to six. plus that we were there before. But we were, you know, I say we were able to save 40 some jobs. Yes, we were able to let go about 20, but we saved about 40 plus. And the people who are there now are still making sacrifices. I'm not taking a salary. Many people are doing different types of pay cuts and still partial furloughs.

But it's interesting. I think that travel, I don't know if you're seeing this with their companies, but I say in travel, 40% is the new normal. if you can operate and exist as a business at 40% demand and 40% revenue as a result of your business, you will be okay if you can survive until let's end of 2021. And for us, really, that's what I'm operating with an assumption, which is our business is going to be 40%. You're seeing that in occupancy rates for hotels in China and even US, like 40% plus minus seems to be the number. And on airlines, where are they at? Are they 30%, 40% capacity as well, I read? Correct.

And they need to get 65% to break even. Is that true? That's the number I heard on. $0.60 and $70. Correct. Yeah. It's international for them, which obviously is a higher, higher price point, makes a lot of money for many airlines. Obviously, that's not happening anytime soon. And so, yeah, airlines isn't a really bad. And we can see it in our business. where we have a newsletter that we bought two years ago called Airline Weekly, really the sort of economist of the aviation sector. It's a subscription newsletter. And generally speaking, people are saying subscriptions are doing well,

which is true in this pandemic. But airline are hurting such that our business there has definitely been affected. All right. When we get back from this quick break, I want to know what you think the route out is, because you must be talking to the smartest people in travel, and they have to plan for an eventual rebound. I'm hearing everything from,

hey, this is going to turn for the rest of the world that took it seriously in Q1. It's going to turn for America in Q2, Q3, and then we're going to be done by the end of 2021, everybody from Bill Gates and a range of people.

I want to get your thoughts on that when we get back. And also about virtual conferences, taking the conference business and putting it online. Is that a big win? a loss. When we all get back here on this week and start us,

we're off at Ali of Skift, SKIFT.com. Go ahead and bookmark it. And if you're in travel, sign up right now for a subscription. Hey, everybody, are you ready to turn your amazing idea

into a website? I know you are. Well, the best way to do that, the absolute best way to do that is how I do it, which is using Squarespace, whether you want to blog or publish content, maybe you want to sell products or your services.

All of that is possible with Squarespace. And it's so easy, and it's so affordable, but most important for me is that it's beautiful. They have amazing customizable templates, and they've added that powerful e-commerce functionality a couple of years ago. So you get the best of both worlds.

You get that great e-commerce combined with the beautiful templates that work and they're responsive. If you're on a phone, if you're an iPad, if you're on a desktop, if you're on a small monitor, a big monitor. You can even buy your domains there in choosing from over 200 extensions. You get search engine optimization as well.

You get their award-winning 24-7 customer service, and you get free and secure hosting. And here's an amazing example. Go to Remote Demo-Day.com. We built the site in minutes using Squarespace, and it looks gorgeous. What is Remote Demo Day, you ask? It was just an idea to have six or seven companies present to a couple hundred investors. And we needed a landing page, and we needed a domain name, got that all set up in literally minutes. And that's what you're going to do right now. You're going to go to Squarespace, get that free trial.

and when you're ready to launch your website, I want you to use the offer code twist, DWISD, and you will save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain name or maybe both. It's an amazing product I've been using it for, I think it's getting close to a decade. It's beautiful anytime anybody says, hey, how do I set up a quick webpage?

How do I get my e-commerce side up and running? What do I do as a consultant? I just tell them, go to Squarespace. It's the best. And you know what? They keep investing in it, and they keep the prices low while they keep the service high.

Great job, Squarespace. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, Roth, it's also in the first name club on Twitter, R-A-F-A-T, R-A-F-A-T, just like J-A-S-O-N. And if you think I'm salty, and if you think I got a sharp elbow, man, Roth. No, I'm done with Aldo.

I'm done with all of them. Are you done? Because you were, you were, I was looking at it going, wow. I like, no. Because that was kind of, are you turning it around a little? little bit because you were getting a little salty on that. I liked it. I like a salty ruffet. Yeah. I mean, look, you've learned, you get knocked around enough in life. You've learned a few lessons and you can talk about that. I have sort of pulled back on it and why. Is it just

psychologically distracting? Correct. And also I think in the pandemic, you realize what is important. And not to go too cliched on us, but much like you said, you spend X number of days with your kids as part of the pandemic. It's not important. Well, that's the thing is, you know, you get addicted to Twitter specifically as a journalist or a CEO. It's like such crack because all of your constituents are there. There's really fascinating discussions. It's kind of the tip of the spear. It's where you're going to find your next story in all likelihood.

So you kind of have to be there. But I don't know if you've ever had this experience where you're supposed to be watching your kids, some tweet comes in and you get pulled into something. And all of a sudden you're like, I'm putting all this effort into a Twitter conversation when I've got these, you know, in your case, lovely son. And in my case, three lovely daughters. And I'm just like, I've got to put this thing down. And I just write to people like going to hang out with kids.

Bye. See you tomorrow. Yeah. I would rather go with my son to the local Queens Beach than than be on Twitter these days. And so- Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a second. Queens Beach. Oh, okay.

I see what you're saying. I thought you met like this river. You're going to Far Rockaway. You're going over the Marine Park Bridge. Yeah, it's, well, if you remember, in traffic time, this would from Astoria where I live to Far Rocko would take about an hour. Now it takes 30 minutes. In an Uber, you drive?

No, I drive. You drive. Yeah, yeah. So you're in Queens. You got the Greek food. fantastic and I used to summer in Breezy Point as a kid, which is on the tip, which was the Irish Italian community. Then you had the Silver Gull, which was the Jewish only club where they filmed the Flamingo Kid. They had Roxbury, which was like another working Irish kind of firefighters,

cops. And they had the Rockaways. And then you had Reese Park, where we used to park at Rees Park. But you get to go to Reese Park, which is a great beach, right? Yeah, great giant beach. I mean, great as in New York standards, great, not California where you live great. But it works. It's huge. You can do social distancing. So back to Twitter. So I've sort of pulled back on it. And what I've done is I've started writing again. Me too. So much more effective. Why did you start writing? I think that when the pandemic hit, because we were in such an existential survival mode, I needed to write the pain we were going through.

And not just as a business, but also the travel industry. And like one of my first articles that I wrote in this pandemic was the day travel, the day the world stopped traveling. That was the headline. And it was, I think, March 14th because that was the weekend where this shut down, that airline shut down, this country shut down.

And so I wrote this article that was very resonant in the travel industry. And then I realized I should write more. I've been writing, I think I've been doing maybe an essay a week or every two weeks I'm doing an essay. This is not a reported, I'm not reporting. I'm sort of giving my essay opinion on what's happening in travel. I think it's important because, you know, it's like guys like us, gals who are, you know, creating these media companies. Sometimes you forget that when you write something, man, it's going to resonate 10x, 20x, your best writer sometimes.

And also we're journalists. I mean, look, you were a journalist when you started. I was one. And so I feel like we forget that. And I know, Ohm, who's a good friend of both of us, has always talked about the discipline of blogging continuously or writing long form. And I think that that was something that I miss. And I think we're also bringing it internally where now, as a remote company,

what I want to do as we build a new sort of culture from here is to create a real. writing culture. Instead of an outgrowth of document, document, document, because you're a remote company with people everywhere. And we want to, as a media organization, create a writing culture. So I feel like it works externally as well as internally as well for us as we go ahead. That's nice. So one thing I wanted to know about was the events business.

We, too, had a large number of events going on. What was your big flagship event? Skiff Global Forum that happens in September. It's like a $3.5 million, $4 million conference for us. Right. And you're talking about 1,000 people, 500 people? 12,200, yeah. 1,200.

Yeah. This is the flagship. It was like the Silicon Alley 99, 2000 conference. Correct. And it's like the Lincoln Center, very marquee venue, as you know, in New York City. It's the big stage, all the big, you know, C&BC's life from there, Bloomberg's life from there. So, or, you know, those types of organization.

So it was very well. known in industry. Now, what do you do when there's a $4 million chunk in your business? I saw you're doing some stuff online. Correct. So we move quickly to virtual. I think virtual is going through the hype cycle that we've seen in every internet cycle. But it feels like virtual events is where broadband video was, remember, obviously you were part of it in like 99. Yeah. Where real audio or real player existed, Windows Studio player. It sucked. It didn't work. It didn't work, but you realized when it was going to come, it was going to have a huge effect on the world.

Sure. And so I think I feel like Zoom, like the tech we're using now is only the beginning of the cycle of innovation that's going to come in virtual. And yes, we moved on. What is missing from Zoom? Because I got pitched on three or four companies raising money who are building more structured.

I don't want to say the names of any of them because I might invest, but you can feel free to say the names of the ones you think. think are important. But where they're structuring, like, here's a lobby. Here is networking where you can kind of like swipe right and left. I want to meet this person. I don't. And then it drops you into five minute little things. There's slack. There's Zoom. Many of them are people are investing. I mean, SpotMe is a company that we are using for our software. Spot me, SPOT. M-E, yes.SpotMe.com. How does that work? And what do you use it for?

So we're using it to that way you said, it's our virtual event environment. And Hoppin is another one, I think that Oh, Hoppin, right. H-O-P-N, yeah. P-P-I-N, yeah, and then run the world. We're testing Hopin for our next event, yeah. Yeah, everything is so early. They will, everybody will promise you the moon and all the features that they build in are all very new.

So as you cross a certain threshold of number of people, be ready for things to break down when you're live. It just happens. It's a feature. at this point. How long should an online event be? Like, because we would go to an event. A full-day conference? Yeah, the equivalent of your full-day conference. I'm saying the Skiff Global Summit was eight, eight hours. We're now bringing it down to six hours. Six hours. And do people come for all six or are they floating in and out? Do you provide them recordings after? Yes, yes. And

obviously, it's live and people can join from anyone in the world, right? Because this is virtual. So people in Australia, they're not going to get up at 3am to start to join a conference. Well, some might. But yeah, it's on demand almost immediately after most of these platforms, or you can do it yourself obviously as well. And so the good part about virtual is that the world opens up, again, 25 years into the internet, finally the world can join your conference. Right. So you get more people. Correct. The cost are lower. But the margins are higher. Of course, the top line is much smaller. Like we have sort of estimated as one, third to one-fourth of...

Okay, so a million-dollar conference would go to a 250-K, but you would remove 500K and live-event costs? Correct. Because, like, you could end up, even in a good scenario with good quality behind it, $50,000, $60,000 you'll pay in terms of production cost and software and this and that. And so the gross margins just went up dramatically. There is a fatigue. People are tired.

are tired of lockdown. They're tired of joining Zoom calls or videos. I do think when the world comes back, like physical events, both will become, will have their own place. I think virtual will have a permanent place as a product going ahead for us and for the industry as well.

What I'm excited about is the hybrid that will emerge. And you and I don't know, I mean, you're probably going to invest in some of these companies that will emerge. But like, if you remember, I think like two election cycles ago,

CNN did, this gimmick on election night where they brought in an anchor through hologram. I don't know if you remember. Yeah, I do. And they were skewered for it because it was just a gimmick for gimmick's sake. Right. But like now, in 2020, why is it a gimmick? This should be a technology that potentially is available, that that merges physical and virtual, right?

It makes total sense now because when you think about it, remember when you and I do our CNBC, do CNBC at all? You should be on CNBC. On and off, on enough. I know I've seen you quite often there. Yeah, I could do it every week, but I do it like once a month right now. It's a big, the thing for me that was really hard was I would be doing 8 a.m. out here, which means I got to get up at 6 o'clock, prepare for an hour, drive in.

I'm just not a morning person. So what's interesting to me is now they're just like all these news networks that required you to go through makeup, be at the desk. There were 20 people there. All those jobs are now eliminated and unnecessary. and all they have is some intern connecting your Zoom call. So you just think about the efficiency of that. Now they can have me on if I'm in, you know, L.A., New York, it doesn't matter.

And you don't have to go to a remote office. So now for them, it's increased a number of people. And they just thought, if the person's not in studio, you're not going to have a great experience. If they're on remote. That was what they swore by, right? That was what they swore by for you for decades and decades. And suddenly, in an instant, it's all you and I coming through Zoom. When you think about this, like I would have told you in the past on this podcast,

hey, when you're in town, let's do the podcast. That was always my insistence. Now what I found with this podcast is I'm getting more timely guests. I am getting better and we're tweaking the technology. Like I'm learning not to step over you. If we were sitting in each other, you know, across from each other, we would, it's easier to not step over each other or to deal with those kind of issues. And you see Anchor still struggling with that today where they're like, no, no, no, you go.

And I was like, no, no, you go. No, you go. So people are starting to learn that kind of nonsense. But it really does open things up a bunch. What do you think the right cadence is? Because the way I look at your business, I think you should do instead of, you should do the SCIF Global Forum, of course. But here's an idea for you. The SCIFT monthly conference, you know, the state of the industry, every month of the year, except maybe August and December, you know, people too busy.

and it's 500 people, it's $100 each or $199 each, and you can buy a subscription to all 10 of them. What do you think of this idea I had, like, of maybe doing... Subscription events? Well, yeah, or like just a monthly cadence. So I have this thing, Angel University. I used to do it. By the way, I get ads on Facebook for it.

Well, here's what we decided to do. This, because it can go anywhere, I said, let's do it where we give all the profits to charity, because we, you know, we're not playing, we're playing to it. investing companies, not to like make money from the tickets. But he said, make it $100 so people have some skin in the game, put all the proceeds. So the advertising comes out first, and then we make 20 grand or whatever. We give it to a charity, which is fantastic. And we've had 300 people show up at each one.

We've done four or five of them during the pandemic. Prior to that, I used to get 50, 60 people in person because that was the most you could have in a room to have a reasonable discussion. So now I'm thinking, I'll do it 10 times a year and have 500 people. I'll have 5,000 people a year. and I don't have to travel anymore. It's incredible. And you can spend that money on marketing.

So what do you think? What are you going to do? Yeah. So the cadence of virtual events has gone up, meaning you have to do more virtual events compared to the number of physical events. Of course, to scale a lot easier than physical events. And we're looking at, I am looking at what you said,

which is subscription for a cadence of events through the year. So 2021, definitely that's part of our plan. We also, by the way, launched Skift Pro, which is our daily news membership service that we launched in July 1st. It's only been about 40, 50 days now. What does that cost? $365 a year.

So it's dollar per seat. If you buy 10, you get it for whatever. There's 300 per seat type pricing. So that's been going very well. So we were jokingly say this. We had an eight-year free trial to Skift. And now that we have habituated the industry to our news, we turn on the paywall. So it's three, three articles

a month for free, and then above that you have to pay. So that's been going very well. It's only very early days in it. We just launched it. We would build our own tech stack for it. And so I'm really excited. Our research, which is our higher price research service, that's been holding steady as well. So I think, you know, to answer very early questions, subscriptions would become a subscription first company. You know, maybe 18 years after I started paid content and finally a paid content business, if you will.

It's so great. It's a full circle that way. What was the reaction to all of your journalists and researchers when you said, hey, pay well going up, less people are going to read and we're going to pay? Would you have a revolt internally? No. So that was a battle that you and I were probably fighting 10 years ago.

Right. That is path now. journalists, almost, I would say almost all journalists anywhere in the world now realize why the businesses that they're part of have to charge, even if it's a smaller audience. So I think that battle has been won by the business necessity of being in media today. So I think journalists typically understand that. So at least that one good thing that has happened. How do you split hiring researchers versus journalists? the difference between those two groups of people in terms of compensation, in terms of work

effort, in terms of their ability to provide value to paid readers? Who's more important? A business research or analyst or a journalist? So for us both coexist. So what we say is research picks up where editorial leaves off. And so the types of people that we hire on editorial, which is very much like journalist reporters that understand an industry can go deep into a subject but are not maybe financial analysis experts.

They always struggle with that, right? Like just getting, teaching a journalist to read a 10Q or to understand basic math around EBITDA and they just, a lot of them freeze up and they get it wrong and then they feel embarrassed or they feel inadequate, right? But it's the, it's, if you are in business media that you and I spend our lives in, that is how you cut your teeth. And you have to learn earnings. And so on our research side, we're not hiring journalists. One, they're not producing daily. They're producing twice a month, for instance. And many of them are ex-Wall Street people. We are hiring analysts, one of our analysts is from JP Morgan. We had an analyst from Goldman Sachs before as well. So you hire people that have that DNA of going deep into it, know where the data sources lie. They don't do well in the daily cycle.

And so the compensation-wise, I don't know if there's, I mean, high-price analysts cost a lot, right? As you know. So it's a different thing versus journalists. It'd be interesting to see how the world changes after the pandemic. if you can hire from anywhere. And so, you know, one of the things I'm excited about, really excited about after the pandemic

is we want to hire anywhere in the world. Really nothing should stop us. In fact, I've been saying LinkedIn should retool its whole business and how to post jobs for a remote world. I still think they're too wedded to the idea of like hiring in a city or locality. I think you can change. the settings there. We've had incredible success using LinkedIn talent and solutions to finding

people because you can do it by work experience, like in places they work. So what we started doing at inside.com, which you used to own the domain, we have been looking at the business research companies and we stopped hiring journalists. And I'll get into why. And I'm much curious to you, I might have a little more of a cynical take on it. But we started hiring business research. researchers and we figured out that teaching a business, teaching a journalist business and capitalism and how that works was taking forever. It was an uphill battle and they actually didn't love capitalism. They didn't love business.

They didn't love statistics or research. So you were kind of forcing people to do something they just didn't want to do, which, you know, as a manager is impossible. Then we hired business researchers and we would. hire them and they would have already read, you know, the good to grades or, you know, this business bio. They already listened to the knowledge project or read Wait But Why or, you know, Star Code is whatever it's called.

You know, they were just basically in the business world. They knew Tim Ferriss was. They were listening to these business news sources. And when I asked a journalist, hey, you know, you really should read this book, good to grade, or you should read these business bios because this is, you know, the common language that you need to understand what crossing the chasm is. Have you read it? And they'd say, will you pay me to write it? Can I read it during the day while I'm at work? You know, it's just like, they don't want to read it. And the other thing I found was a generational thing. And I don't know if you've seen this, but when we were coming up as Gen Xers, capitalism and innovation and business was revered, perhaps too much, but it was revered. And people thought, these are great action. in society. Capitalists, people creating jobs, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, these are all heroes. And now this next generation, I would say from the millennials in Gen Z, they look at them as, you know, not all of them, but some large contingent, look at them as the enemy. They look at

them as everything that's wrong with America. So if you're trying to get a millennial journalist to write about how great this business is, they actually kind of maybe don't like capitalism. and they want to go more socialist. Do you see that trend in hiring young folks? Certainly, we've seen, you know, look, you know, this very well, almost better than I do. Managing is a different game than it used to be than when we were younger. And it just comes with, it comes, you know,

the whole thing about bringing your whole self to work, right? That's a phrase that you probably have heard quite a bit. I am of the school that work has a certain place in life. you get it done, then you move on and live the rest of your life. And show up with your best professional self for that eight hours or ten hours, whatever it is. Then go live your life. If there are ten other things you bring to work, work is not an adult daycare. Unfortunately, Google and others have sort of habituated the world to that.

Adult daycare, I love that. And, you know, work is work for a reason. You get paid for it. You do the work and you move on. Quality work, yes, but you move on. And I think that that, I think, is a little bit lost. People are grasping onto finding meaning in work beyond, I think it's capable of. Especially if you're not an owner, like if you are working for somebody versus being an owner.

People are trying to find too much meaning out of work. And they want to sort of reflect every. inequity happening in the world through work. But sometimes that's not possible. And so I think that's kind of how I look at it. I am, you know, and it's just the cognitive burden of sort of of managing a company with people wanting that from, that meaning from work is hard. So I think it's become much harder to run companies today.

Have you given up on doing that? Do you just give people this little kind of? of discussion we're having right now? And then I'll tell you how I deal with it now. No, no, no, no, but you know, I think what I'm excited about, I think for us as a company now that we're becoming, we're fully remote as a company,

is it takes away the burden of office and office work is gone, which means that I can focus on the right things for the company. So it takes away a lot of, it frees up a lot of hours, not just in commutes, but also in terms of managing in an office environment. That's interesting. So you kind of get back all those management cycles, you get back, they get back the commute. I think a little less interpersonal drama exists in a virtual world. Interesting.

And so, which I think NetNet is good for all of us. Like we should have a personal life that is completely enriching and a work life that enriches that helps enhance a personal life versus vice versa. And so I think that part I'm excited about. I started paid content in my bedroom when I was working for you. I know. And I didn't fire you when you came to me when I found out. I remember. I always saw people the story.

Like, somebody was like, did you know that? Raffitt is doing paid content. dot org and I was like I'm sorry dot org and they're like yeah he couldn't get the dot com I was like I pulled it up I was like I don't know if you remember the conversation but it came to you on the desk and I was like I know you're doing this thing let me explain something to you kid I'm your editor you need a goddamn editor blogging is stupid you guys just published without anybody reading it and you were like

but but boss I think it's cool and here's the reason I was like I listen kid just get back to fucking work I don't care what you do on your weekends I just remember that conversation at your desk. Yeah, of course. Is it accurate my memory? Because memories were these things. I remember my side of it. I remember.

I think you're calling me into your office and maybe pulling up the site is what I remember. Yeah, and then I turned the monitor out. What the fuck is this? Yeah, those days, you remember those monitors they had the big ones? Yeah, the big CRTs. Bulky ones. Yeah, so that's what I remember.

And then coming back and then somebody asked me, what did he say? He said, whatever. Yeah, just continued doing it. And you know what? I give you a lot of credit, too. I've said this to other people that when I sold, you know, venture reporter and Silicon Air Reporter to Wix business, which bundled it and sold it to Dow Jones, private equity firm, I was looking for something new to do.

And I was like, wow, there's Gawker, Boing, Boing, and Paid Content.org. And you told me at some point, Jason, this is the greatest thing ever. I'm making $5,000 a month. and you were, so I'm making like 50, 60 grand a year. You were paying me 30. And I'm working from home in my underwear for five hours a day, and I love it. And then Shannie was like, I'm making $5,000 a day, a Boing Boing. We make $20,000, because remember Boingway was the number of blog in the world.

And what's his name? Battal was representing them with Federated media. And so they were getting tons of sales. And she said the same exact thing to me, and it was the same number. She said, yeah, and we're all chopping up like 20. We make like 30 grand. media takes 10 and then we each get 5k each or something or maybe they were taking 20 or 30 for their like sales rep business and i just thought to myself wait a second

shenny and raffett are two of the best people i've ever had on the team and they're having more fun and they don't have to take a shower well fuck this i'm starting weblogs ink and then i call brian and i said brian i got the domain named weblogs uh ink it's business my idea is to do topic. weblogsink.com, Wi-Fi.com, Android. Dot, whatever it is. Yeah, and he said, I said, come with me to the Patrick Ewing

retirement, sorry, we were both big fans of the next. We went to the Patrick Ewing retirement when they put his number up, and I said, I have no money, I've lost everything, I need you to bill me the software and do it with me. And he agreed, and we became equal partners and then Mark Cuban invested.

But I do remember that moment, it was like, you were a big part of the inspiration for me because I, what I, the big, The big learning for me about blogging was the best writers, their editors were fucking their workup. Was that the magic of blogging, you think? Is that the editors for people like you or Peter Rojas or O'Mallick, was it, or Shani, the editors were taking the edge off of it?

Well, I think the structure was not working for people that needed consistency of output and blogging by the nature of the tool that was, the promise was every time you come to the blog, there should be something new because it was reversed, as you remember, reversed chronological order. And so us being, going deep into subject and covering it from all possible ways,

it needed the intensity, which the less layers there were between the intensity of output and being published, the better it was. So I think that worked for us. We could go deep into subject. I was going in the business or content. and Ome was tech and Peter Rojas was gadgets.

And I think that it was pre, obviously, pre Twitter, pre any type of social media. But you could go into a subject with the intensity that you had never seen before that traditional journalism with the layers couldn't bring to it. I think now the pendulum has swung completely the other side where social media has completely destroyed a lot of these things. but I think I still miss the

dailyness of the blogging part. Yeah, I was just tweeting the other day like we should do a weekly blog caravan. I don't know if you remember the caravan concept or the blog circle concept where like 10 people would write about the same topic and link to each other and it would help your Google rankings but it would also just share your audience.

Block circles, wow. Yeah, it was pretty cool, right? And I was just like, you know, we should get like 10 of us together, like old school folks and just try it. Like every week we just write 500 words. each on some topic and we tag each other. What else have you learned is the upside to remote work on, you know, a business level?

You said taking out the drama, being able to hire anybody, what else is going to help? Shame on us if we if we waste a pandemic, right? As a business, I think the costs get reset. I think New York and obviously Silicon Valley where you are. And a bunch of other places, the costs had been astronomical, both from a labor perspective as well as from office and other types of cost as well. And so now that we're able to hire anywhere, literally anywhere in the world, the cost get normalized,

whether people, like even in our company, people are moving out of New York City. I think out of the 40 people that were New York, I think 10 or maybe more are moving out of New York. So 25% are pulling the rip court, and these are professionals. Correct. People have been living forever in New York City. Some of them were native New Yorkers. And so one moved to Seattle, another moved to Dulc, Minnesota, another moved to Tennessee, another move to London, in fact. And so people can be anywhere. And I think one or the other, hopefully this in media, I mean, there are a lot of things wrong with media and the economics and media. It's hard enough to run a media business. if the economics gets strengthened a little bit

by cost being spread around the world, the media business will be better for it. So I think that's another lesson in terms of, well, we're not hiring yet because we're just not in a position to hire today. But when we do hire, hopefully starting next year at some point, we want to hire anywhere in the world.

So I think that will be better in terms of costs as well and become a more resilient company. What was a five-to-tenure journalist, business journalist, you know, five-year experience, experience or so in New York City getting was the average salary. I mean, I look at the Vox because they have a union, so I was looking at their union salaries. I think it was like 56 or 65K or something. What was New York running at for a business journalist? Seventy-five or so. And the average salary of a business journalist in the United States is more like 45 to 55,

correct? Probably, yes. Certainly B2B, that's the case. B2B is depressed compared to B2C just because it's a different type of industry. So if you were working for like American City business journals or any local business pub like the cranes used to be or whatever, those were 50K jobs. So basically, you're going to get three for one. Correct. Entry level for a journalist in New York City is about 50K. So 45 to 50K. 50K seems to be the norm these days in terms of entry level, one or two years.

Entry level in New York City, entry level one or two years. And so the cost had become high. And so, and it's not the fault of the journalist system, living cost, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, they were taking that 25K, given whatever, seven of it to the government. And then they would take that 18K, a thousand or 1,500 of it was going towards the exorbitant rent. Right. Now they move into Tennessee or Milwaukee or wherever, we're living in the country. Their rent's going to go to 500 to 1,000 to 1,000 a month instead of 2, 3, 4,000.

And so, or they could buy a house for the first time and be happy. Correct. I mean, for $200,000 you can get a house compared to New York where you won't find anything for less than a million. What do you think of Zuckerberg saying, you can work from home, but if you were a San Francisco employee and we gave you that $30,000 bump, I'm making that number up. He wasn't specific. But I know that's about the bump people were getting for living in the Bay Area.

He said, if you choose to move to another place, you need to tell. hellishore location, and we will adjust your salary down to the new salary. Yeah, I know that's a controversial topic. Yeah, it's a controversial topic. I'm not going to solve that. I think bigger companies will solve it and will adopt whatever norm emerges on that. Yeah, I don't mean to trigger anybody at Skip right now that they're going to get a pay cut, but, because, I mean, in your case, it doesn't, it's so close anyway. But in the case of a big company with thousands of employees, it's unfair. I understand Zuckerberg's position. because what he's thinking about is somebody was already working in Milwaukee or Tennessee,

and they, as a developer, were getting 100K. And they gave the developer who moved to Palo Alto the 30K cost of living, and they were getting 130. Now that developer moves to Milwaukee, lives next to that person in Milwaukee, and they're getting 30K, they're doing the same job. How is that fair? But also, we don't have this, I've never heard of cutting somebody's salary. Yeah, it's not, from what I understand.

understand it's not illegal. Of course not illegal. No, it's at will. By labor laws. But it will probably, you use the word trigger, it'll probably have consequences today. And so we haven't considered that for now. But going ahead, if you're going to hire in, I'm making this up, if I'm going to hire

in Thailand, obviously the salaries there are going to be different than the salaries. Net, from what I understand, if U.S. companies, higher anywhere else. They get higher salary compared to the average mean of local jobs in the location. So we would probably pay higher than the Thailand rates, but it will still be lower, obviously, than

US rates. So I think net net that will, that's what the resource is. That's incredible. I have Canadian employees myself at different companies, and you know, we're paying Canadian dollars for anywhere from 40 to 60K, depending on

entry level to whatever, six or seven, but that's 25% less. So you start thinking about just Canada, and the number of people in Canada don't turn over like they did in Silicon Valley or New York. Like the turnover rate of an employee in Canada, I'm going to guess for the startups I know who are hiring there, whether it's Slack or us or other people,

the tenure is going to be three, four, five years. I don't know what your tenure was running. You're a great boss, but the tenure in Silicon Valley, I think it's 18 months. And that just becomes brutal because people don't get good at their jobs until year two, three, four.

you know, become really great contributors. Yeah, I think that's true. I think the sense of like New York and Silicon Valley is like there's always a new thing coming around the corner. So, you know, I think some of that will go away with this downturn that unfortunately we're all part of. See, I think it's really interesting. Are you actually thinking about specifically Thailand or places like that? Yeah, I will hire, like I've said, I could hire. And again, really anywhere.

What would a journalist researcher with five years experience and a Thailand cost, do you think? MBA, English native speaker, I think you have to go with, or somebody who's just massively proficient in English. Yeah, $30,000, $40,000. U.S. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, I actually do not know that. So that's interesting. If it was, you would, if you, you could spend 30,000 U.S. in a place like Thailand. I know the Philippines is just, like, it was a dollar an hour when we had, like, for mechanical Turk, like work, I'm not talking about writing a sentence because it would not be, it would not

clear market with the people who are paying $300 for the pro. As a journalist, right. Yeah. But for research, it could totally work. And you would be the highest paid person. So that's, I think, really interesting on a globalization basis. Right. You are paying higher than what the average norm there is.

Like, I'm looking potentially also like South America because the time zones are the same, right? Ah, Canada. Yeah. Like Columbia, for instance. So Colombia is Eastern Time Zone. but like a lot lower costs as well. Interesting.

Yeah, it's going to, the pandemic is going to allow people to rethink everything and not seem like a strange weirdo. Like when Matt Mullenweg was doing this like, yeah, WordPress is going to build a billion dollar company, he's going to be remote. Everybody's like, this guy's weird, man. Like, what are you talking about?

He's like, yeah, we have clubhouses. And it was just like this weird, like, and I give him a lot of credit because he held his ground with the 37 signals folks, Jason Freed and David Hamar Hansen. In fact, we're moving to base cam now as our sort of virtual headquarters software. Oh, neat. Yeah. Right now, we're Slack and Notion and Asana.

I mean, we got, we get the notion as well, yeah. Notion's addicting. It really does. It's kind of like a internal wiki. Yeah. And then you can make, it's better than Google Docs because Google Docs, it's siloed. It's not like one Wiki. And you still have to email docs to each other.

And it's just, it's not, they don't have. the notion type or base camp type structure. Yeah. When we look at, so anyway, just to put a pin in this, it's really going to be interesting to see who the winners and losers in all of this are. If a business decides they're going to locate in New York and keep everybody in New York and have really high salaries, they will be at a distinct disadvantage to the media companies that decide to go global, correct?

Well, look, media companies, as it is. have bad economics, so it's not like they can exist in that type of world anyway. And so I do think this gives a chance for media companies to become more resilient. And I think that's my point, which is, yes, we've struggled with digital media generally struggled with bad economics for businesses. They're not typical venture-back type businesses, as you know. So this gives us a chance. Yeah. Correct. This gives us a chance. And so that's what I'm excited about it on that. when you look at Vox, which my good friend Jim Bankoff,

and he gives me a lot of credit for it. He said on Caroswisher's podcast recently that he learned the playbook and was inspired by the weblogs ink. He bought your company and brought you in as the sort of disruptor. I, in fact, interviewed him when you sold the company to him. He said, I'm buying this as much to get Jason to change our culture as I'm buying the company. And change it did.

It was like a bull in a china shop. I'll tell you that. There's some great stories there. But putting that aside, you know, he took the Engadgette team, the joystick team. He created Vox. Vox gets really big. And then they've had massive layoffs now. I think they just shuttered, curbed, unfortunately.

But they kept Eater going, which is fantastic. Or they're consolidating. Actually, in fairness, are consolidating curbed into New York MAG because I actually traded emails with them because he corrected me. But when you saw the unionization. of unprofitable places like Gawker, Vice, and Vox, and right down the line. What were you thinking of like, because I looked at it and I was like, oh, my God, these businesses are struggling and then they're going to add a layer of unionization on top of them. It's going to create, like, this is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Like these businesses need to totally change their structure. and now you're adding a level of unionization on top of it, which I'd never seen in my life. What were your thoughts on that? Do you have a unionist? Remember we talked about, no, we don't. But remember what I said about not tweeting that much anymore? Yeah.

I'm not going to get into that. I've most reticent to even ask you. I'll just tell you my feelings on it, which was like, literally you're going to go fight to squeeze more out of an unprofitable business. All you're going to do is crack the business and break it. And I think those businesses can only succeed right now with BuzzFeed, Vice, BuzzFeed Vice, and Vox, I think two of the three of them, if not all three of them, are going to merge, cut half the brands, cut half the expense, and then just reset all the salaries.

And the media business is just going to have to do what competitors like yourself or I'm doing it inside or other people are doing modestly with, you know, very lightweight products or the information is another one, and just reset the capital structure. of everything, right? I mean, they have a window of about a year, year and a half left, right? This is the time to do it. During the pandemic, because they're running out of money. Correct.

I mean, these are the times that they could do these drastic steps without too much backlash. And so I would not be surprised if that happens in the next year, year and a half. Yeah, it's going to be crazy. And then the other thing that's crazy is, like, by the way, if you squeeze the business too much, they can just move the jobs to another region, like Canada, like Columbia, like all these other places. So I think all they're going to do is if they squeeze too hard, it will just create a reset where people just say,

you know, I'm going to restructure the business. Like, operate, you know, this editorial group is going to operate out of Columbia, this one out of this place. Let's talk about travel. I am hearing that things like Uber and extended stay hotels in certain regions are now getting back. to 60-70 percent. Is that a correct statistic?

So extended stay, which is longer-term hotels, right? Yeah. They were doing, they have been doing well throughout the pandemic, which is people using that as a longer-term stay, whether people moving out of cities and staying in these hotels for a while or people just wanted to get out of their house. So extended stay, in fact,

they're the only hotel extended stay America. Yeah. is the only public hotel company that has posted profits through these pandemics. And so... Because they have kitchens, right? I mean, if you have a kitchen, you don't have to go out. That's why I love staying at those.

And I like, you know, people are like, oh, are you staying at the four seasons? I'm like, I like a place that has... I like a kitchen. I like to make my coffee in the morning. For that reason, Airbnb, which a lot of people were riding off at the start of this pandemic,

and people are done with short-term rentals. Nobody wants to stay in another house because of the cleanliness, et cetera. Guess what? We are here today, August 10th, we're recording. Story today that they're looking to file their IPO in the next month. So they must have had a huge rebound. They must.

So, like, probably one of the biggest comeback stories of this pandemic, business stories of this pandemic will be Airbnb if it happens. I mean, it may still not happen because IPOs are very dependent on where the markets are at, you know, that week. And so people traveling locally, obviously that's what everybody is doing. They're not traveling international. And people wanting to stay in houses that they can either control the space themselves or clean it themselves. And that's why short-term rentals outside of major cities, like the prices on Airbnb, today if you go,

you'd be surprised that it's the highest I've ever seen for houses or places just because there's so much demand. Obviously, it's a summer too. so this is peak season for that perspective. But it's expensive. And it looks like, I think Brian, the CEO said maybe last week that their July was the highest July month that they've ever had in terms of the bookings. So it's an incredible story.

So I think the tailwinds they have are, Americans can't go to Europe this summer because we've been banned. I think Americans are allowed in Mexico, Turkey, and Turkey. Like we're not allowed. and are we allowed anywhere? No, not in Europe anywhere. I think there's potentially

one country in Europe that you can go through. I think that there's that. But you can go to Caribbean islands and you can go to Mexico. Really, that's it. Right. So people are basically driving somewhere. Yeah.

Let's talk about if it's so just to wrap up on Airbnb. Airbnb going public has what impact on the entire travel industry? Are they demolishing the hotel business or just inducing more people to take longer vacations and more people to take vacations? Well, so in general, before this pandemic, the hotel industry was also booming. It's not like Airbnb was booming, yes, before this pandemic, but also hotel industry

is swimming. So net net there were more people. There was more demand. And you and I traveling have different personas when we travel for business or when we travel for with family. So I would book a hotel for a business, a quick business trip, but I would always book an Airbnb for family just because, you know, we have kids in the same space. And so I think that behavior, and we're traveling more, you know, compared to certainly 10 years ago that you and I were traveling. So I think net that the market has increased and it lifted all tides or the boat lifted all ties, whatever their phrases.

The rising tide lifts all boats. All boats. And so now where demand has contracted dramatically, now people will be choosing. Obviously, people are not traveling for business, most of the people, I mean, except for essential. So I think business travel is going to be affected in many cases permanently. Okay, hold on a second. What is the permanent impact? on business travel.

Is it that now that everybody has a home studio and has proven they can do certain things over Zoom that they are going to not have to go do the sales call in person? What's actually happening with business travel? Yeah, we did a story last week that said, the headline

was, is the single business trip travel over? That's not the example. But the point was that if you're going to make a trip for a single meeting, those types of business, those types of trips are probably gone. You want to collect enough meetings,

whether or not a conference or something when conferences come back and be able to do that. A lot of the things that we thought were not possible doing on video are not possible for us to close deals, for us to do sales, for us to be doing conferences over video as well. So I would expect a permanent potentially, 10 to 20% demand going out of the market permanently.

In fact, I'm not the only one saying that Delta CEO has set an earnings call that he expects business travel to be permanently impacted. And so I think that'll be very, very interesting. From an opportunity on your side of the world perspective, what will fill that gap? And it's the virtual tech that you will be investing in, and investors like you'll be investing in that will create the future there. What happens to airlines? because I've been, there was a study out of MIT, and they said, when the middle seat is removed, the chances are like halved that you could catch coronavirus, and the chances are one in 2000 or one in

four thousand. This was not peer reviewed or anything. I'm paraphrasing it, but it's pretty obvious that, well, I'll ask you this. In your mind, do people in the airline industry believe flying on airlines is high risk or low risk with COVID? And does the, what road? What impact does the middle seat make in any case? So what do people believe? Yeah, middle seat, even if you take out middle seat and a couple of airlines in the U.S. or the southwest, and I think United are doing it, or maybe Delta. I forget exactly.

But you're still not six feet between the window and the aisle. Yeah. Because it's just not that much. So they're saying if there's not six feet, then there's no point keeping the middle seat empty. and so you know but southwest and I think JetBlue maybe as well are keeping the middle seat empty the surprise surprise airline industry says the risk of catching COVID through airlines is low okay because that's what helps to market what else are they going to say right they got a worse than the race but they have they do have something called the very high HEPA filters or something it's called

and these are filters that the filter the air many times a minute or every few minutes the air gets recycled. But if you're sitting next to a COVID person without the mask, you're going to get COVID, right? Right. And so masks can become mandatory. Generally speaking, I think the evidence is that COVID hasn't spread through flights themselves.

Right. And so far there's no evidence, but in U.S., the contact tracing has been so bad that we don't even, I don't think we can even know that for sure. trains and subways and buses, it's the opposite because they don't have great air circulation. Correct. And people are packed in in New York City at a level that's absurd. What happened?

Or used to be absurd. What is, what is, because public transportation is part of travel and it's a huge part of what happens in China and Europe in terms of people traveling. How are they dealing with the changes in trains? Are they limiting the number of people per car? Yeah, yeah. Windows open. Correct.

I mean, right now, because of summer, you can do that. When the weather turns bad, we'll see what happens. But, yeah, I think in Europe, they're limiting capacity. People are behaving better there than, unfortunately, compared to U.S., but, yeah, in general, the capacity has been lower. And, you know, I think train travel done right, I would say is even if the search is good. It's probably safer than even air because the touch points are less. You don't have to go to an airport. You have to go through security. There's not too many layers in between. And so, you know, if there was a choice, I would take a train than a flight today. Somebody was asking me the other day, you run skift. Would you take a flight today? Oh, what's the answer? Would you take a flight in 2020? No.

Would you take a... Too many factors. Okay, good, finish one. variables to control. Too many variables to control. It's just... And you're not high risk, right? So that says something. I actually, unfortunately, I am high risk. I have asthma as I had a asthma as a kid. I had asthma as a kid. I don't think makes us high risk now at our ages. I don't know, but that's what people, yeah, I don't know. But so I haven't taken that risk, unfortunately, I haven't taken the risk. Would you take, you know, a three-hour train ride, you know, in the United States from, you know, Philly, you know, New York, Philly corridor? From New York to D.C. I would.

I would. Not with the kid, but I would on my own. Just because controlling kids would be hard. It's really super fascinating. I want to end on this. You get a lot of data coming in, and I'm going to frame this from two perspectives, what you personally believe

and what you think the consensus in your industry is. Consensus in the industry, when Americans, consensus of when we go back to normal, which I would describe as people are going to concerts, on flights without masks, where would you put that if people in your industry? 22. Q1, Q2, Q3, what do people think?

20, I mean, look, are people more smarter than Bill Gates? Yeah, I'm saying people in your industry who are making bets. Look, the delusion has been there forever in this industry, in the travel industry. In March, it was, oh, this is March and April, it will come back and see. summer. Summer came is going to come back and fall. That obviously hasn't happened. Today, as we said, it is clear that it's 20-21

for most part will continue to be a loss tier for this industry. And as I said, if we can operate at a 40% level and we can survive 2021 with 40% level, vaccine comes, has mass usage and mass

adoption, etc. 2022 potentially is where the industry will start the recovery path. And recovery path is a long path. It could be three to five years for demand after 2022 to come back. So at the start of this pandemic, I said the industry should start thinking about 2025 as the year where the numbers come back to pre-COVID numbers in travel. Wow. So it's going to be like a lost half decade, basically. Correct. And they all sort of massacred me on LinkedIn. You're just too alarmist. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh,

Not that I knew, but these things always take time. Demand goes out a lot faster than it can come back. And, you know, we saw that after 9-11 with the airline industry. We saw that after the 2008 financial crisis. And this is of a whole different level. This is all different level. All right, listen, we're going to end there. Everybody do me a favor.

And if you're in the business of travel or in business in general and you care about travel, your company needs a subscription to skift. You just go to skift.com. You put in your credit card. You buy it for 300 or so, and you're going to get great value out of it. It's really a great product. You follow Rothett on the Twitter, R-A-F-A-T. He's not as sharp elbow and salty.

I kind of like it when you mix it up a little bit. But, you know, whatever. You've got to do for your mental health. You can't be in battles all day long while you're running the company. Hey, listen, Raffet, it's good to know you. And it's even better to watch your incredible success. Thank you, brother. Thank you for all the support. Yeah, it is my pleasure.

I mean, you were there for me when I had nothing, and you believed in working for me, and you worked long, hard hours to help me be successful. And it's just so gratifying for me to see your success. Continued success, everybody again, please tell everybody you know, tweet about it, tweet this episode, and just support independent media companies by taking out your credit card and signing up for skift.com.

S-K-I-F-T-com. You will love it. it. Okay, be safe, please, my brother, and we'll see you all next time on the spring service. Bye-bye.