This Week in Startups - E1138: Ask Jason! Benefits to growing a company internationally, Apple’s new chip impact, investing in solo founders & more!

Episode Date: November 13, 2020

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Welcome everybody to another episode of This Weekend Startups. I love doing Ask Jason. This is where founders and investors ask me questions, and I do my best to answer them in as candid and as honest a way as I am capable of, which you know is going to be really brutal and entertaining. Stick with us. This Weekend Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Marketing. To redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch.

your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. Clavio is the e-commerce marketing platform that helps brands build relationships with memorable email and SMS messages. Today, more than 50,000 brands like LivingProof, Hint, and Chubbies choose Clavio to help them grow. Get started with a free trial at clavio.com slash twist. That's KLAV-I-O.com slash twist and Masterworks. The first company allowing investors exposure into the blue chip artwork asset class. Twist listeners can skip the 25,000 person wait list by going to masterworks.io and using promo code twist. Do you have questions about startups? You have questions about life, technology, where the market's going. And I have the unique privilege of every week,

every month, every year for the last 25 years. I've covered technology and startups as a journalist and as an angel investor. It's kind of in the name of the program this week in startup. So if you ever want to ask us a question, you just email ask jason at launch.com. Askjason at launch.com. Launch.com is for launch. Launch is my fund. So just, just email anytime you want. Askjason at launch.co. If you send a video, you'll have a greater chance of getting on the show. The first question is from Vareen. Let's listen to his question. Hi, Jason. My name is Varin. I'm from Sydney, Australia, and my startup is PropertyML, where we're focused on delivering the most accurate property valuation model using AI. My question to you is centered around startups outside of the US.

And what I wanted to ask you was, generally speaking, do you find that startups outside the US are rushing too fast to get to the US instead of taking advantage of the local market that they're familiar with? Or on the flip side, are you finding that they actually aren't showing enough urgency to get to the US and to unlock that large market, which would be much larger than the one they operate in? Thanks, Jason. All right. Great, great question. So one of the amazing advantages that founders in Australia, Canada, Ireland, and let's call them the smaller, under 100 million people, under 50 million, in fact, in your case, 25 million people live in Australia, I believe. Ireland is, what is it, 5 or 10 million. Canada's 25, 30 million. One of the great advantages you have is you can build an English, language app. Let's say you were going to build Robin Hood, the trading app. I happen to be lucky enough to be an angel investor in that one. I'm not sure if I was a third of the fourth, but let's put that aside for a second. And you wanted to launch Robin Hood. You wanted to try free trading.

Well, how different are people in Canada than the U.S., Ireland, than Canada, Australia, New Zealand? These markets are generally going to behave similar. They're not exact, but you can grow in self. So what many companies do is when they want to make a big change, like a big company, like Facebook, they will test that change in Australia. Because people in America can't see the Australian App Store and they're not allowed to download those apps. So it's a great way to A-B test. So your question is, how do I time that? Well, if you think you have a killer idea and you want to go stealthy and you don't want the press to know about it, the American press, they're underwere. resourced. They're not getting a burner phone from Canada and going into the Canadian

App Store. They might, they might. Some savvy ones use something like a VPN to look at websites from different regions and see if there's some differences. So I think it's all about learning your customer and what kind of investors you want. So let's break that into two parts. If you want American investors, you're going to need to be able to prove that you can address the largest markets in the world. And Americans are very self-absorbed and know their market. So we haven't to have a lot of investors here in America on the investor front, building it in Australia and then sharing those results with an American investor and saying, don't tell

anybody, but we figured it out in Australia. Look at the engagement. We have this AI product. Look at what real estate executives are saying about our product in Australia. It doesn't exist in America. And we're going to bring it there and you get a first shot at it. That's kind of a cool, cool little stealthy way to do it. And after Canva, who was on the podcast and Atlassian, people are looking to Australia and saying

there are great investments to be had. So I think that's the strategy you want to play. You figure it out there. Then you approach American investors when you're at that. You know, for this American investor who has a launch accelerator, I'd like to know when you hit 5 to 10, K, a month, even Australian dollars. That's fine with me. There's still dollars.

Yeah. By the way, Melanie was on episode 939 back in May of 2019. And that was a good get. That was all Jackie. Thank you, producer Jackie, because my goodness, she is a very focused founder who doesn't want to waste time on podcasts. Luckily, she did ours after two years of trying. So that's your best playbook, I think.

Now, if you're not so concerned about investors because your product is easily fundable, let's say it's a side project and you don't need 30 people, it's just a two-person project. And you want to test the United States. Yeah, by all means, go ahead and test. I don't think people, the bottom line is the investors are not going to hold it against you if you make a good decision. They're going to

want to understand your decision making. So in a lot of cases, when investors talk to you, we're trying to figure out, how did you come to that conclusion? Because we aren't, I'll speak on behalf of the investors who have really winning portfolios over time. As I said in my book, and a lot of people repeat back to me, I don't need to know if your idea is going to succeed. I need to know if you're going to succeed. So when we, ask you, why did you start in Australia or why aren't you in America? It's the thoughtfulness of your answer and your strategy that we're looking for. We're not looking for one answer or the other. We're looking for thoughtfulness. We're looking for insights. We're looking for how much you know

about your customer. So that's the second piece is the customers. If people don't are not, if the real estate executives in Australia are not sophisticated enough or there's not enough transaction volume for them to need your product, this AI product that tells you the valuation if I understood correctly what you're doing? Well, if there's not enough of those real estate brokers in Ireland or New Zealand, well, there's no reason to test there because it's just not a big enough pool to test. So you might want to try a larger market. I think what we're seeing in terms of investors and, you know, I don't want to dip into identity politics or other toxic things is that people, because of Zoom, are becoming international.

You didn't ask this question, but they're becoming international in terms of what they're willing to invest in, provided they speak the language. Now, you're saying, oh, my God, xenophobic, I don't speak the language. Well, there's a pretty pragmatic reason that you can't invest in a market where you don't speak the language. You can't really use the product. So I get pitched all the time, hey, check out this product in China. Check out this product in Japan.

I can't use the product. So if my superpower is understanding the product and the consumer, I'm at a loss. But what that does mean is, use your brain, Spanish speaking investors have been doing this for a long time. I've seen investors from Spain and Mexico looking in South America or South American investors, you know, from Brazil looking at Mexico. And I think that's happening in the English speaking world now. So you're just totally teed up. Look, you're here on this week in startups. and you're able to reach people and meetings are now happening on Zoom.

So getting that quick 15-minute Zoom meeting is so easy. VCs do not want you flying 12 hours to meet with them. It just creates a reciprocation effect that they don't want to have, which is, oh, my God, you flew all the way here 12 hours. So take advantage of that. If you're in Australia, if you're in Canada, if you're in New Zealand, if you're in Ireland, you probably are paying half as much for a great developer or 30% less or maybe a third of what's happening here in the Bay Area.

And take advantage of that. And great question. And I wish you great success. If you do hit 5 to 10K, come to the launch accelerator. Let me give you 100K and we'll work together for 16 weeks and see if we can get that, you know, I don't know, 5, 10K a month, 20, 30K a month, whatever you got. Let's see if we can double it. If we can prove that you can double in 12, 16 weeks, we're on the road.

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LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. No spaces, no dashes. Get the Hyundai now. LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. Okay. Let's get back to this amazing episode. All right. Let's take another question.

Hi, Jason. My name is Henri Kumar. I'm one of the partners and co-founders of Infect Digital. We are a growth marketing firm, specializing with startups, helping them scale growth. And so our team's all ex-Facebook. But the question I have for you today is because we end up working with a lot of venture capitalists and so. And a lot of the feedback that we get is that they are wary of investing in single founder

teams per se, right? They want to see like a group of founders and so coming together. Is that a consideration for you? Are you open to investing in single founder teams? And if so, what kind of traction do they have to have? And are there certain verticals that you just won't touch if it's a single founder? And so I'd love to hear your feedback. Thanks.

Great question. You're asking specifically about me. Here's what I care about. I care about making money, being successful, and dunking on everybody in the world because I got to a startup before they did. To me, that's delightful. I love that. I'm kidding, but not. So let me give you a little history.

on the single versus dual versus, you know, three or four or five founders. And I'll give you some examples because everybody loves a good example. I met a gentleman named Raul. He had like five co-founders for a really brilliant little app. And he got to the point where this little app called Reportive was gaining steam. And LinkedIn came along and said, we want to buy your company. Now, I don't even know the other four founders of, I literally couldn't tell you the other four founders of reportive because it's been 10 years. The company only existed for a couple of years before they sold to LinkedIn. And they sold for what would be the equivalent of like for me as an investor getting a single, getting on base like because I got hit on the head with the ball. I put 2550K and I got back like a hundee. You know, it's 4x. I made 50, 75 grand. It's not going to change my life. I know it sounds obnoxious. but to me that's the worst possible situation. But there was a great thing. There's five co-founder.

So if you lose two, you got three spares. That was something that Paul Graham realized early on with Y Combinator. Why Combinator had a massive influence on the startup ecosystem. I give Paul Graham so much credit. I know people find him polarizing the Overton window now is so tight that Paul Graham's tweets trigger people. And I mean, that's a whole other episode. He's a brilliant person who has made such an amazing impact on the technology industry. It really more, he's done more for the tech industry in the last 20 years, I think, definitely top 10, maybe five.

Putting that aside, he realized when he was giving people money, in the early days he had no money. So he gave 8K per founder. So if you had two founder team like Reddit, he would give them 16K. If you had three people, he would give you 24K. If you had one person, he'd give you 8K. You can look it up. It was something in that sort of broad strokes. And the idea was you're going to work on it for three or four months.

You're going to have 3K each. It was ramen. He called it ramen funding. I'll pay for your ramen and part of your rent. You guys work for three or four months. If it works and it works out great, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. that's why you have this addiction to the multi-founder approach. I don't care because there are maniacal people who are exceptional founders who are so good that for them to have a co-founder

would only slow them down. What co-founder in the world is going to be able to keep up with Mark Zuckerberg? Come on. What founder in the world, what co-founder is going to be able to keep up with Elon Musk. You know, like Steve Jobs had Waz. That was actually a true co-founder because he needed a technical person at that time. And so in some cases, it's just much better to not have co-founders.

When it is good because it creates redundancy. It is bad because sometimes it creates conflict and, you know, problems. The number one killer of these multi-founder companies is infighting between the founders. You don't see that typically in a solo founder. But with the solo founder, if the solo founder, you know, loses their mind, jumps the fence. Now you've got a problem because who's going to run the company. So I don't over-optimized for this. I think it's stupid to over-optimized for it. I might say Paul Graham's stupid for doing it. He had a reason to do it. It was like a mechanical,

technical reason. And he was doing 100 startups. It makes total sense there. What I'm trying to say here is there's so many more, there's so many more important things to think about with a startup. How good is the idea? How good is the execution of that idea? In other words, how good is the product? How much do the customers love that product? Will the customers be absolutely distraught if the product goes away? Like, if Tesla went away tomorrow, I don't know what car I drive.

I go back to driving a Corvette. I mean, I would be heartbroken if I couldn't drive my Tesla, right? And a lot of people feel that way about their iPhones or their Uber or their postmates or their Airbnb. Like, that's how good the product has to be. So focus on that. I don't care. You want to be one. The only problem I do have is when there's like five.

Because then who's in charge and then how much equities left. So then that becomes a math problem. Solo founder gets diluted 20%, 20%, 20%, 20%, 20%, 20%. 20%. Okay, somewhere along the line, they own 20% of the company when it goes public, right? Or something in that range. You give five co-founders. Okay, you know, VCs come in and take 30%, five co-founders, five co-founders have 12% each. Then they get diluted 20%. So they're down to 10%. They're down to 7%. And, you know, when you start getting founders into the low single digits, you know what they start thinking? If I start over and I'm a solace,

founder, I can have 85% of this bleep in company. And I seen it happen. And it's a real bummer. So you got to top off those founders. I have a little secret for that because I'm usually early in and I'm the early advocate. I'll just say to the latest stage founders, the latest stage investors, listen, this founder is at, I don't know, in one case it was like, I don't know, 11%. I'm like, this kid's killing himself. He's got 11% of the company. The company had to raise money. It was a pretty hard situation. He doesn't have a co-founder, but I want to give this founder five points over five years. People were like, oh, my lord, I'm like, well, he's almost fully vested. You want to run the company? And we'll put the five points and we'll tie it to something,

like performance or whatever. And I got everybody to do it. Then I was in another situation, happened to be a female founder. She was down below. 20%. You know, I think it wasn't as acute as the 10% situation. She was at like 15. She wants to do the top off. She says, I want 10% where I went on 25%. She had just taken a couple million dollars. I'm blurring some of the details here, so it's not identifiable. And I said, okay, I support you. But, you know, there's two other, there's two other board members. You have to win over with this thing. And so she said, well, you talk to the board member. I talked to the board member. He's hardcore. He's like, no. No. Hit your numbers for a year and then make a request. You still have 18 months left on your vest.

When you're through this vesting schedule and you've hit this millions of dollars in revenue, then I think you can make that request. And I was like, okay. For me, I'm like, I just want to lock the founder in. I don't want them looking over their shoulder. So great question. I gave you a little more information than you asked for. But no, Jason at calicanus.com doesn't care if you're solo or two or three. And my point about the Raul's story is, lo and behold, he started another company called Superhuman. There are other partners there, but he's running the show, basically. And I think he's kind of a solo founder, although there might be some folks who consider themselves on the founding team. So there's a lot of, like, nuance to this as well. The way you know who the founder is, is there

somebody who owns 30 or 40% of the company? That's like a solo founder. And if there's two or three they own, you know, typically 10 or 20% each, which can be a lot of money if you stick around. If you're an e-commerce-based business or have direct-to-consumer products, well, then you know you've got to get Black Friday and Cyber Monday perfect. You know that's on your mind. It's coming right up. Well, don't sweat it because Clavio is here to help you. Clavio is the ultimate e-commerce marketing platform for online brands of all kinds and sizes. They do email automation, SMS, marketing, which is super effective these days, growth tools, analytics, and you'll get everything you need to build a really strong relationship that keeps your customers coming back,

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season. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. This is from Yarrow. Hi, Jason, and this week in startup podcast listeners, my name is Yarrow, long-time listener, first-time question, asker. Also, co-founder of inbox done.com. We provide a human being to manage, reply to, and handle all your email and social media messages. My question for you, Jason, I'm a syndicate member. I've been investing in some of your syndicated deals for almost two years now. And every time I make a decision about how much to invest in one of the companies you syndicate with us, I'm always kind of torn with should I be putting in 2,000, 5,000, 8,000, 10,000, how to judge how much to put in.

I always look at things like what is the current valuation of the company, obviously the idea itself and how much I believe in it, how much I'm excited about it. But really, I'm not always sure when is the best time to putting a small amount in versus a larger amount. Because I know in your book, Angel, for example, you talk about placing many bets and then increasing your amount in the winners, basically. So would that mean put $2,000 in every single deal? And then when they come back for around two, then you put in five or ten and so on. Love to get your feedback. Thanks, Jason.

All right. That's a great question. It speaks to portfolio management, and this is critical. The biggest mistake in an angel investing is like finding, you know, the first two of three companies you love, you put $250K in those two companies, you know, and you don't have enough diversification to hit an outlier. There's something called the power law, power law. Basically, listen, I'm no genius. I didn't go to graduate school, barely made it through college at night. But the power law means like one event makes up the majority of the returns.

In other words, you hit an Uber, you hit a com, and everything else in your portfolio is going to be a small percentage of your returns. There's some great power law here in Angel investing. So that's step one. You have to get, in most people I ask this question to, I've had people in Silicon Valley who are connected tell me you got to get to, you know, 20 investments to have an outlier. I think the number is like 30 or 40 to have an outlier. Maybe I'm a little conservative.

Nobody knows for sure. So that is in terms of diversification. Now, if you hit 100x and you put $1,000, right, into each of those 30 deals, you would have one deal that returned 100,000. So you're now over 3x cash on cash. and the other 29, whatever happens, happens. They could all go to zero. That's the power law at work.

Now, you're going to be pretty bummed out. What if you knew that you should have put, you know, that extra 10K into com.com or Robin Hood? This is like a high class problem to have. And I think playing poker is a really good example of this. Sometimes you get aces and you're like, I need to get a bunch of money into the pot and you raise and everybody folds. And you're, you get that bummer where you're like, I had aces. Or you flop your set and you slow play it and nobody bets, right? And you didn't get enough money into the pot. It's not a perfect science, right? So one of the things I'd like about your

question is that you're trying to figure this out. You almost universally have a chance to put more money into the company, especially if you maintain a positive, constructive relationship with the founder. So please always do that. What that means is, you know, if there's 20 things that are broken with the product, for sure, if you feel like the founder wouldn't know about it, you could send it to them. But I would send it with three things you love about the product first, right? Hey, really enjoying this calm sleep story. Love this. I noticed there was a misspelling on the page here. You might want to have somebody check it. You know, sounds stupid, but you want to keep that really positive relationships because

founders are burnt out. And then you have a chance to put more money. in. So why would you put more money in? Well, you just look at the growth. If a company is doubling or tripling revenue year over year, it's in the high growth to high growth potential outlier zone in my mind. If the company is growing at 50% year over year, it's not dead. It might break out, but it's not breaking out. We're talking about small numbers here. So you went from a million to a million five. You went from two million to three million. That's good. Nothing wrong. with that. You can build a real business, but it's not going to be Uber. I'll tell you that. So you're really looking for companies that have that 10, 20% month over month growth.

If you're growing 10%, you're doubling revenue every seven months or so. If you're going 20%, you're doubling revenue every three or and a half, four months. So if you have that in your mind, as you're North Star, you can objectively look at the numbers? Hey, can I see the quarterly revenue? Can I see monthly revenue? And you can make the decision with that data in mind of which ones to plow more money into. There's also the fun. You know, you're a rich guy, you're a credited investor. Kind of fun for you maybe to change up your style and say, I have three bet sizes. I make 2K bets. I make 5K bets and I make 10K bets. And I do it on my intuition. I do it when I talk to the founder, if I think the founder is a winner, I pick 5K. If I think the founder is a winner and I think

I love the product I put in 10K. And you know what? I like you doing that. It's not like some perfect science. You're kind of getting a gut. You're getting a feel for the game, right? Intuition. It matters. When I talk to founders, sometimes there's something above their head just lights up and says winner, big neon sign, winner, winner, winner. I think like everybody's got a superpower on this world. And if I have one or two of them, it's that when I look at somebody with talent, that sign shows up. Nobody in the room sees that neon sign that says winner above the person's at except for me. It's a very weird experience for me because I'm like, that person is really impressive. And other people are like,

they are? I'm like, you didn't see it? You didn't see the winner sign? So you develop that yourself. Maybe for you it's product. Maybe for you it's the reviews on Amazon of the product or somebody told me that glass door. They were like, did you know this company? Look at glass door. And I was like, what are you talking about? They're like, look at glass door. And I was like, I'm sorry, what his glass door again. It's like, oh, that's a place where disgruntled people complain about their former boss. Like, don't look at mine. It's like, that guy's a maniac. He expected me to work 50 hours a week. I was like, yeah, that's why I don't hire snowflakes anymore. Boo-hoo, you had to work 50 hours a week. Oh, I'm so sorry. I mean, when did working 50 hours a

week become so crushing for people? I mean, I worked six days a week, 12 hours a day for the first 10 years of my career trying to make something on myself. Boo-hoo, you had to hit 50 hours a week. Putting that aside, they seem to think that Glass Door was a great way to get a feel for the company. It's very poor. That's not possible for one and two-year-old companies, but for five to 10-year-old companies, Glass Door can tell you a lot, especially as if you're sorted around, you get to see the feel for the company. I'd like you starting, I just love what you're doing. I just love it, I love that you're in the game. You're making decisions.

The big thing, the big mistake is to not get on the court, to not pick up the ball, to not take the shot, to not buy the chips and get at the poker table and take some goddamn risk. And take the risk with the money you can afford to lose. Don't be stupid, but don't be scared. Scared money, don't make money. Let's take another question. Well, you guys know all about Masterworks. If you don't, it's the first company that allows any type of investor, whether you're

retail or accredited to gain exposure into the blue chip artwork asset class. I had the founder and CEO Scott Lynn on the program back in July. It was episode 1087. Now, I had one question that I wanted to answer during the podcast with Scott Lynn, which was, what are the signals that a young artist is going to break out and maybe appreciate? How do you know that? Because that's what I do with startups. Well, here's his answer.

What gallery represents the artist? So mega galleries tend to influence artist's careers in a huge way. We look at what institutions own an individual artist. So the more institutional support an artist has, we like to think the more sustainable that artist market or their artist's career is. Then we also look at who else is collecting that artist. So are major influential collectors buying that artist. And those are the three things that are early signals that help understand

where an artist's career could go. What an amazing clip. Bottom line, you can diversify your portfolio by investing in an asset class that is not correlated with the stock market. And there are 25,000 people on the wait list for Masterworks.io. But if you use the promo code twist, TWIST, bump, you get to skip the wait list. So go ahead and visit masterworks.com. And use the promo code twist. There's a bunch of disclaimers you need to read at masterworks.

dot i.o slash disclaimer if you want to check out the full episode search for episode one thousand eighty seven scotlin ly n on this week in startups all right daniel you got a question hey jason daniel here with winhouse software and after hours podcast i had a few questions for you first question what is one thing you wished you would have done differently during the beginning of your professional journey next question is what is the best way that you've seen for growing a podcast. I'm going to take your second question first. For growing a podcast, you should do a podcast if you enjoy it. You get joy from it. You love the topic and the enthusiasm that you feel before the podcast is starting just bubbles up inside you. Today I knew I had an ask Jason to tape.

And you know what? Looking forward to it. Day before I was looking forward to it. When I have my all-in podcast with my besties, besty C, besty D, besty, Freiburg, Friedbergers, Queen of Kinwa, Rain Man, David Sacks, the dictator, Besty C. Chimoth. I mean, I get like that tingley feeling. It feels like I'm on my way to the schooly yard to play basketball at my friends and I'm 10 years old again. You know what I'm saying? That feeling. That's the feeling you should be optimizing for with your podcast. Don't worry about the goddamn audience. Don't worry about growing the audience.

Worry about that feeling you feel that tingling that you can't wait to have that conversation. And if you do that, then it's going to grow. There's too many boring Me Too bullshit podcast out there right now. Podcasting, I started this thing 11 years ago. Do you think I had any conception that podcasting would be this big? I mean, of course I did. I'm Jason Calacanis.

I do this for a fucking living. I knew there was something there. I'll be totally honest. I didn't think that Joe Rogan was going to get $100 million out of Spotify. I mean, that is crazy. I didn't think that this podcast would be 150 episodes a year, sold out six months in advance the ads and have six or seven people working on it. I did this because I love this.

I'm looking in the camera right now. I love this relationship. I love when you stop me on the street and you say, oh, episode this, oh, the time you had soccer on, Travis's episode. I loved when you had Melanie from Canva on. When that happens, that's the magic for me. I know you felt my enthusiasm for that conversation, right? So don't worry about marketing it. Don't worry about the growth. Worry about having a great conversation and that you love it.

If you don't love it, there's no way the audience is going to love it. They'll see right through it. They're going to see right through it. And my God, some of these. podcasts are so bad that when we're looking for guests for our podcast, sometimes I'll listen to a podcast. I'm not going to mention any names. There's a lot of people now who are investors who are like, oh, I've got to have a podcast. Look how good Jason Kelloggannis did with this podcast. Oh, I need to have my podcast. And then some of these other investors who are contemporary, some of mine, I won't mention their names. They do a podcast. And I'm like, oh, my God, this person is a terrible interviewer. But this guest is really good. And I'm almost like in

pain suffering through this episode. And then I just said, Nick, producer Nick, go get me this person so I can do the interview properly. So that's how you grow a podcast. Now, there are some little blocking and tackling things that can work. I think clips are nice. People seem to like clips, sharing clips on social media. I guess that's super obvious.

I think making yourself available to the fans of the show. So I do my little secret book club. slack thing. I kind of make myself available. But the most important thing is to do what you love, to do something that gives you that passion, that tingly feeling. In terms of early on in my professional journey, what would I have done differently? Thinking long term is very hard for young people. And so there's a balance there. You want to have that success. So you start thinking, like, I need a 10K raise. I need a 5K raise. I want to have my own office. I was obsessed with some of those kind of things early in my career. I really wanted my own office.

for some reason when I was working at Sony. I was like, oh, I got my own office. Like, that means something to me. And then looking back on it, that wasn't what was important, you know. There were bigger, important things. I think I could have taken a little more risk. I mean, I was pretty risk-taking, but even for myself, I look at everything I do now and say, well, how can I take more risk?

What would be even more audacious? Like, I've been looking at this podcast and saying, can I get a, of five days a week, because we were supposed to be this week in startups, like once a week. Then it was twice a week. Then it was three times a week. And I was like, I wonder if I could get to daily. That would be interesting. I don't know if we will. I mean, we could do it, but I don't know if I would survive, but I really am enjoying doing it. So think bigger. When I was on Angelist and Naval showed me Angelist, I was like, oh, that's cute. Like, it's sort of like my open angel form, but on a website. And he's like, yeah, it's going to change everything, syndicates.

I was like, I don't understand. What's a syndicate? He's like, it's an SPV, it's an LLC. Like, I start glossing over. Anytime I hear legal stuff, I'm just glossing over. And he said, trust me, it's work. And I was like, all right, I'll try it. So I do a SPV special purpose vehicle LLC, do my first syndicate on Angel List.

Turns out to be calm, my second best investment of all time. And I was like, wow, this is amazing. There's like 300 people in my syndicate in the first year. Then I left Angel List. I wrote my book, Angel. And now I have over 5,000 people growing at 5,000. 500 a month in the largest syndicate of the world at the syndicate.com. I should have left AngelList after the first deal and just done it myself, right?

But I thought, oh, maybe I need to be on this platform. Maybe I need the help of the support. And I think just continuing to be more audacious and to swing and go, you know, you have to assume and believe that you can get it done. That's another way of kind of looking at it. And if you just assume, well, somebody's got to figure this out. why not me. Somebody's got to be the world's best angel investor. Somebody's got to have the, you know, Joe Rogan didn't wake up one day and be like,

I'm the best comedian ever. It was like, I host a game show that makes people eat worms or something. I mean, what was that called? Fear Factor. I mean, but he followed his passion. And for some reason, he became the number one podcast around the world because he liked having these long conversations. He clearly studied Howard Stern and thought, you know, there's something there. And he followed his, his passion. And he went. big. He went daily. That's another thing he did. So putting your two questions together. The fact that he went daily, he became a habit for people. Good questions. I wish you luck on your journey. And let's take another question. This one is from Patrick. Hi, Jason. I'm a software developer from Montreal, and I want to know

what impact you think the new M1 chip from Apple will have in the computing industry. We are going to have to catch everybody up on what's happening with Apple. Apple has so much power in the industry that they are making their own chips. Now, with smartphones, there were obvious reasons for this, and they had such great insight into where the world was going, and they had so much resources that they went from buying Intel chips for their computers or buying other people's chips, to making their own. Now, when you do that, you have this massive advantage. You become not reliant on other people. Elon is pursuing the same strategy with Tesla, but he couldn't start there. The first Tesla, I was like literally just charging my roadster number 16. It's like 15 years old.

Now I can't believe it or something like that. And, you know, that thing, as people know, was based on the Lotus frame and all the parts came from different places. Then you got the model S and the steering column looked like the one of my Mercedes. And I was like, Elon, you know, the steering column looks like the one of my Mercedes. He said, yeah, Mercedes put $50 million in. We're using their steering column. I was like, oh, okay. Now he's making his own batteries.

But that takes massive resources. It takes multi years. And so we've seen this over and over and over again. When a company is successful, they just buy up all the little companies along the food chain. This idea of original equipment manufacturers, OEMs, that's a great way to start because you can build things without having to be responsible for each component. So in the original days of drones, quadcopters, a lot of those accelerometers and the hardware were coming from smartphones. But at a certain point, you want to control your destiny and, you know, just looking at, you know, what they're going to do, the claims are pretty crazy, but this M1 chip, you know, they've been

doing these chips in the phones for a while. I don't even know what the name of the, okay, so they're up to like A14 on mobile, I believe. So they've been doing this for mobile for a while. Now they're going to start this process. And the M1 chip's going to be in the MacBook Air, the Mac mini, which I think the Mac mini is the best way to go if you want to use a Mac because you can get a big widescreen monitor from Dell. So if you're addicted to the Mac operating system, I would encourage you to buy a giant Dell monitor and put the Mac Mini in it. I have some people my company that do that. It's going to take years to get these chips to be super powerful, you know, in IMAX and the IMAX and the IMac Pro and the MacBook Pro. But the advantage

they're going to have is because they control the whole stack, they know how your computer is operating and when it's failing and when it's grinding, right? So if they know that people are using Zoom and video conferencing all the time and that the GPU needs to be better, just like GPUs got better for video games, they can really start to invest in making the chip match the data they have, the big data they have about how people use their products. And it's obviously they like to have things that are very slim, so it could slim things down, it can make it quieter.

And I think that part of this is going to be iOS apps working on your desktop. So if you've heard me talk about the Chrome operating system, which I absolutely was addicted to, but my addiction got broken on Chrome OS because of Zoom because Zoom on Chrome OS is terrible. And so literally the pandemic, Killed my love of air with Chrome OS because I had to use Zoom.

So now I'm on a Windows machine right now. I love my Dell's. I really hate Apple products now because they're so much more expensive and slow and they seem to grind to a halt. So I'm back on Windows. But they'll integrate, which Chrome already has, the ability to load,

I believe, apps onto your desktop pretty easily. So imagine you love a certain game or you like the UX of the Spotify app and you want to use the app on your desktop, you'll be able to do that. But, you know, the Apple story, they kind of gave up on even caring about desktop computers, I believe. The Mac Pro, like their tower is an embarrassment for years. The Mac laptops are overpriced and people hate them, like their core community. Most folks would be much better off buying a PC today because Windows is as good of an operating system and you can get two or three times the product.

Now, who knows, maybe this will help, but you knew they were going to go in this direction. And it's interesting. You know, it also will get them more profits because to the extent they were giving Intel some profit, like Intel had to have a profit in the chips they were selling them. Now that profit accrues to Apple, just like if, you know, right now Tesla is buying batteries from Panasonic, wherever they buy them from, if they make their own batteries, if there profit in the batteries, now they can either take that profit or they can make their product cheaper. I think Elon kind of signaled already is going to make a 25K car or something.

I think part of the idea of him bringing batteries internal is we'll still use other people's batteries, but if we make our own, maybe we can cause the price of batteries to go down, which is the number one thing. We sell more cars. Great question. It's definitely something to watch. All right, let's take a question from our friend Ben. Hey, J-Kal.

I'm Ben Sterling from First Robots competition team, 699. nomad here in San Diego. My question for you is, what should high school or college students do to get more involved in the entrepreneurship community despite not having much experience? On the other side, how should startups discover upcoming talent and recruit the next generation of engineers and innovators? Have a good one, Jason. Thanks. Great question, Ben. I love the fact that you put As Jason on your whiteboard and that you are getting into entrepreneurship early and you're watching the podcast. So, you know, young people who want to be entrepreneurs should start building, start making stuff. And don't worry about what you're making, having a profit margin.

Just worry about shipping product. Make a Chrome extension. Build an app. You and your friends get together and build something that you think is fun and do it for the joy of it so that when you go build it, you're not building it because you're trying to make money or, you know, change the world. you're just enjoying the act of building it, right? Like when we go play basketball, we're not trying to win the NBA trophy.

Like, that's not why we're just like being together and playing basketball and putting the ball in the hoop. So I think there's a lot of people who ask me how to be successful. You kind of got to do stuff. You got to have action. And when I made my little 16-page photocopy magazine, the Silicon Alley Reporter, and before that when I did Cyber Surfer Magazine with a publisher.

You know, the difference was in one of the cases, I was working with a publisher who had control over my destiny, and then, you know, it was a big glossy magazine and it reached a lot of people. But then when I made that 16-page photocopy magazine, Silicon Island Reporter, that was me, you know, and it would not have existed if I didn't put that $1,500 on my credit card to print those first, you know, 2,000 episodes,

2,000 issues or whatever it was. So I think just be of action, make stuff. Build stuff, and you will be part of the community. And nobody knows your age. Like, that's the other thing. I meet people all the time. People email me, like, I built this product. I click on it.

I look at it. I at no point in time do I think how old they are. And that goes through the 60-year-olds to the 16-year-olds. I'm not thinking, oh, I wonder if this person is too young or too old. You're going to get judged on your product and how awesome it is. So just get building. Build stuff, man. Just build it.

Don't wait. and college and school, you'll see. You'll see how much you learn. You'll see how much it costs. I mean, if your parents are rich and they want to spend a quarter million dollars on sending you to school, fine. Congratulations. You got lucky. Your parents are rich.

If you're unlucky and your parents aren't rich, don't go to $200K in debt. Don't go $100K in debt. Don't go $50K in debt. Go to community college if you really want to or city college, state colleges. No shame in that game. Just don't go into debt because you want to have the freedom and the optionality to go take on. creative projects. The problem with your generation, or I should say millennials, really, the reason millennials, I think, are really bitter is they really got bamboozled. They got hoodwinked.

They got slipped the Mickey. They got tricked. They were told, go to school, get a graduate degree, and you'll be fine. And they all got these like stupid degrees in political science, social sciences. I don't know. They came up with all these crazy degrees. None of the matched the skills needed in the world. And now they're sitting there on their 150K debt and they are embracing socialism. They're like, yeah, everybody should get their debt paid for free and nobody should have to work

and everybody should get free health care and free lunch and free transportation and free everything. I get it. You got screwed. They slipped to the Mickey. Don't fall into that trap. I think the Gen Z folks are really smart because they saw how absolutely suckered

millennials got. See, when I went to college, it was 9, 10 grand a year to go to Fordham universities, and I went at night. So that was 40K. I did it over five years. So if you just do the math, that's 8,000 a year. I paid for it by working. You know, 8,000 a year. It's a lot of money, but it's like whatever it is, 400 bucks a week. You know, I just worked hard. I paid it off. I think I had like, had the Pell Grant, which was $1,500. So maybe at the end, I had $6,000 in debt. I got my first job. I paid it off in the first year or two. Man, don't fall for this suckers game of going to some big college and $200,000 later, you got some BA and BS and you can't pay it back and now you're bitter because now you can't start a startup because you got all this

debt. Zero debt, low cost lifestyle, but high risk and make shit. That's how you succeed. Don't get suckered. When they tell you you need to go, the college degree that Elon Musk, Google, even Google, Google was so elitist in the beginning. Oh, we only want people who are, you know, went to these schools. And, you know, there's a bunch of companies that had all this like degrees and schools that they were obsessed over. It's gone. It's over. It's done.

Nobody cares. What code, what coding language do you know how to use? How hard do you work? How well do you work with other people? You know, how good do you communicate? What kind of ideas do you have? How responsive are you? Do you take ownership?

ship, that's what people are looking for in the world. I'm looking for a piece of paper with some degree on it from some college. Nobody cares anymore. Like literally, my degree from Fordham, go Rams, blah, blah, blah. Like, did you think anybody in Silicon Valley, the tech industry cares if I went to Fordham or not? Like, even now, maybe MIT and Stanford people care about, maybe Wharton. I mean, there's a handful of schools. I think some people are just like, wow, that's great that you got in there.

But they can't pull the wool over people's eyes any longer because when some actress from desperate housewives or whatever she was on and she's in the can right now doing six months, if those people, those maniacs were spending $500,000 to lie, cheat, and steal, what a disgrace. What a disgrace those people are. I mean, think about what example you're setting for your kids. On top of the quarter million dollars we're going to pay to the school, I'm going to pay $500,000, to somebody to pay somebody up with some Fugazi donation to some Fugazi charity that's going in the pockets of the person who teaches or is the coach of the rowing team or something. I mean, Fordham's now like $65,000 a year.

I think that's just a tuition. I mean, I don't understand what happened between 1988 and 2018, 10, 20, 20, it's like 30 years later and all of a sudden this thing go up that much. It doesn't make any sense. It's a rip off. go spend your money. Sorry, Fordham. I'm not saying Fordham. This is specifically a ripoff.

I think all this higher eds are ripoff. I mean, if I give you 65K, you sound smart enough like you and two or three of your friends could build five products. I bet you one of them is worthy of coming to the launch accelerator. So get to work and build shit. And degrees mean nothing and don't go into debt. Live a low, low, low, low, low, low expense lifestyle. So you have more options to take more risk. I'm sorry to the millennials who got screwed.

Sincerely, I am. I think there is an argument to take your student loans. I hate to say this, but you did get hoodwink so bad that I think we should take people's student loans. And if they make under 50K a year or whatever, their tax return says, they should be able to get, you know, whatever, a year or two off of paying back their loans. There should be some loan. I don't want people to be forgiven for their loans, but I think spread them out because they did get suckered. All right. This has been another amazing episode of S. Jason on This Week in Startups.

Thank you for tuning in. Again, if you have questions, you want me to answer them, slide into my DMs, or really the best way to do it is to go to at TWI startups on Twitter, Twitter.com slash TWA startups. I got two or three people working for me who check the DMs there. You slide right into the DMs. You make a video, you send the video, they download it. We put it on the show.

I'll answer your question. Don't be too plug heavy. That's annoying. Like you can say the name of your company, but you don't have to, like everybody in the audience knows when you're trying to do a commercial. like ask a sincere good question so we can have a good conversation. Don't waste everybody's time. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.