This Week in Startups - E41: “Angel” Podcast: Shawn Carolan, Managing Partner at Menlo Ventures shares insights on his early investments in Uber, Roku, Siri & JUMP Bikes, adjusting his approach in response to hundreds of new venture funds with billions in dry powder & more!

Episode Date: April 10, 2020

0:01 Jason thanks the sponsors, guests, listeners & the team for Angel Season 4! 4:38 Jason intros Menlo Ventures' Shawn Carolan 7:26 Thoughts on the market's reaction to COVID-19, when will it get back to normal? 11:51 What advice is Shawn giving to his portfolio founders? 19:07 How has the job of a VC changed with the influx of hundreds of new funds, and what impact has the large amount of dry powder done to the industry? How has Shawn adjusted his approach in response to this? 26:07 Why paying a high price on valuation for dialed in startups (like Shawn did for Uber's Series B) is still a great bet 34:13 Shawn on passing in investing on Mahalo & Jason 36:20 What was it like having a "Force of Nature" portfolio founder like Travis Kalanick, who would destroy any obstacle in his path? What are some great founder attributes? 51:24 Shawn takes us through his Siri investment 57:55 Shawn takes us through his Roku investment 1:02:25 With the influx of Seed & Series A startups, how has Shawn adjusted how he meets founders? 1:05:00 Shawn takes us through his JUMP Bikes investment, are micro-mobility unit economics broken? 1:07:43 What will the outcomes of COVID-19 be in the startup community? 1:28:05 Shawn asks Jason how to best utilize his domain expertise to create high-quality content for Menlo Ventures

All right, this is our 10th and final episode of Season 4 of Angel, the podcast. Thanks again to our incredible guests and our sponsors, LinkedIn. We couldn't do it without you. Shout out, Blake Barnes, for being on the pod. Ashore, thank you so much for helping us with our fund management here at launch. Zeus Living and NetSuite. Great job supporting the pod. An amazing and amazing effort by our internal team, Nick, Matt, Marine, and Charles.

And of course, thank you to you, the listeners. And what a lineup it was, Sarah from Index, Dan from Koto, George from CRV, Sarah from Benchmark, Ajay from Bain, Nicole from Lightspeed, David from Bessemer, Sarah from Greylock, Jeff from GGBV, and today, Sean Carolyn from Menlo Ventures, investor in Siri, jump bikes, Roku, and of course Uber. So a great season and we'll look forward to seeing you all for season five. Enjoy this episode. Season 4 of Angel is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. You already know. know LinkedIn as the world's largest professional network. It's also a better way to find great

talent. Go to LinkedIn.com slash angel and get a $50 credit towards your first job post. Assure is the leading provider of special purpose vehicles and fund administration with over 5,000 completed transactions and $2.5 billion under administration. Angel listeners can get 20% off their first SPV at a show. Shore.co slash Angel and NetSuite by Oracle, the business management software that handles every aspect of your business in an easy-to-use cloud platform. Schedule a free product tour and receive your free guide managing business uncertainty at net suite.com slash angel. Hey, everybody, welcome to Angel the podcast today. I'm taping this on Thursday.

Oh, no, yeah, today is Thursday. April 2nd. It's all melding. We're in, we're closing in on 30 days in the official shelter at home here in San Francisco. Thoughts and prayers out to anybody impacted by the disease, which seems to be everybody at this point. Everybody knows somebody who has contracted the coronavirus. So thoughts and prayers to everybody. And just a big thank you to everybody on the front line. That includes the Amazon, Instacart, Postmates, Uber Eats, Grubhub, all of you all keeping people fed while they stay.

home, your heroes, to the janitors, the nurses, the doctors all out there getting it done, and even the public transportation system, which I guess there's a debate if that should be running or not, but it does seem some people need to take the transportation system in order to get food for their families and to go see health professionals. So shout out as well to the bus drivers and to the mass transit, even Uber drivers and Lyft drivers out there getting it done. It's tough for everybody, but we will get through this. And we will carry on. producing the podcast because you're home and my advice to all founders. Don't give up. Don't give up. The economy needs you. Now, to talk about the economy after the big disclaimer I just gave about people

dying sometimes might seem callous or maybe I'm focused on the wrong thing. Well, in a crisis, you have to focus on what you can do. You're all listening to this podcast this week and startup are likely not doctors, you're likely not nurses, janitors, Uber drivers, post-maids drivers. There's very little you can do except stay at home. Now, what are you going to do when you stay at home? Yeah, spend time with your family. That's great. But creating jobs and making a vibrant economy so people can have a vibrant livelihood. Job one, keep people alive. Job two, we've got to keep people's livelihood because that's how we pay for people's rent, their child's education, all that great stuff that people need. And so I encourage everyone.

everybody who's an entrepreneur to survive. Survive equals success. Whether it's a one-person company when you come out of this or a 10-person company, down from a 100-person company, 50-person company, if you survive, you can rebuild. Do not give up. That is the message. So we're going to keep doing the podcast. We're going to keep talking about these issues. So you can have a little motivation, maybe some tactics, and generally not feel as isolated as being kept at home will make you. And I got to tell you right now, I am not designed for social isolation. You all have been listening to this podcast for a decade.

And I love to talk. And I'm losing my mind at home alone. And just even doing the podcast for me is really helpful for my own mental health. Today, Sean Carolyn is with us. He is with Menlo Ventures. And I met him maybe 12 years ago when I was pitching my startup. And although he didn't invest in Sequoia did and some other folks did, I always noted, Sean, that you were absurdly generous with your time.

advice and he kept it super positive. Welcome finally and thanks for coming on the podcast. If my notes are correct, you have not done a podcast yet. How on earth, Sean, did you dodge a podcast for the last five years? Welcome to the program. Well, thank you, Jason. You're very generous and it's a little bit scary to think that that was 12 years ago. But yeah, positivity is definitely one thing that I think you know is absolutely required, both for investors and startups to see a path through because obviously the ads are stacked against you. And how are you holding up through all of this? Is the family okay?

Everybody you know okay. I just want to start with that, of course. My family is healthy. Very grateful for that. And I think like you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, I go to the grocery store and just have such gratitude for a person who's checking me out and stocking the shelves and the essential services that are still flowing have several healthcare workers in the family, doctors and nurses and worried about them, you know, parents that are elderly.

So it's a really hard time for everyone, but I appreciate your thoughts that, yeah, you got to do the best you can, you know, both at continuing what you were doing beforehand and then extend, I think, you know, some helping hands to whoever you can help in the way that you can and gratitude and, you know, with entrepreneurship, in addition to what you said, just, you know, surviving is really trying to make good decisions because we are an environment where there's not incredibly good data, you know, a lot of uncertainty about, you know, when things in, how things in. So just, you know, being very thoughtful and relying on people around you measuring twice, cutting once. I mean, we've all worked very hard to build great teams and, you know, you don't want to prematurely cut people. If you don't have to, that said, you don't want to, you know, spend money that you don't have and the capital markets are contracting somewhat. So just being very thoughtful in the decision making and very thoughtful in the way you talk to people about what's happening and what you know and what you

don't know. Like, I think as CEO is kind of a lonely job sometimes. But, This is really not a time to be lonely pounding your chest. It's a time to open up and make everybody part of the struggle that we're all going through together. And there's two things I'll pick up on there. We don't know three things. One, we don't know when the capital markets are going to reopen. This is an open question, but we do have some precedent there because we've seen markets open and closed before. And you and I have lived through that.

We lived through the 2008 crises, the Great Recession, financial crisis. And I'm not sure if you were an investor during the, you started right after, I think, 9-11 and the dot-com crisis. That's right. You kind of started at the perfect time as an investor. So looking at those three seismic events, what can we learn from those about when normal or almost normal happens? You know, each, especially an event like this, you know, those are all black swans that come from different origins and different mechanics in the way they manifest in the economy and in our mindsets, right? You think of basically all of the things that we do are just driven by human decision making. And so I think what's really interesting about this one is, you know,

There's the first order effects of just people getting sick. And let's say, you know, if you get this, you survive, you're out for two weeks. I mean, that's a two out of 50, you know, 4% productivity drain for that person. But their families around them, right? There's the mindset of just, I'm scared, I'm anxious, I'm not sleeping. There's the healthcare systems. I think the most impact that we're all seeing right now is the second order effect of this is really a humanitarian. crisis where, you know, the hospitals are being overwhelmed. Obviously, you don't want people

to go in and not be able to get the equipment that they need. And so, and we all obviously have family members that are probably in a high risk age demographic and stuff. So I think it's pretty amazing to see the way the whole country has come together and said, like, even if I don't feel like I'm directly at risk. I'm going to participate in this until we have a better read on what's happening. And even the data, like we just don't know the denominator. A lot of these ratios on, you know, death rates, infection rates, et cetera. We don't know how many people have gotten it and were asymptomatic or have gotten it and recovered quickly because the testing hasn't been there. So that's, I think, the hardest part is when you look at the ripples throughout

the economy and certainly the mindsets like this little piece of protein is with us, you know, forever. So you say what's going to change the trajectory? And it's, of course, you know, looking at the data, seeing when the curve starts to come down is like, okay, at least, you know, the dramatic social measures, social distancing measures we took, we're able to mitigate that. But, you know, until you have effective treatments, until you have a vaccine, you're certainly not going back to normal. So then it's a very, I think slow protocol of increasing some of these things. But like, you know, when's the next time we're going to be able to go to a sporting event

with 10,000 people in a stadium and feel safe? Like, I don't know. That could be, you know, well over a year. So that's the hardest part to predict. And I don't think it is particularly helpful to look past at some of the other ones because they were just super different. Yeah, and that is the challenge in this. And if you're an entrepreneur or an investor, you're really thinking about systems.

you're thinking about the second and third order effect, you're thinking from first principles, and you're trying to unpack something that has so many unknowns and so much bad data. And people are trying to look at the Spanish flu data and apply it now. And I just saw somebody be on Twitter was like, yeah, I'm not sure about the validity of data from 1918

or whatever it was. And I was like, yeah, that's a fair point. We really don't know. And it's scary not to know. So when you don't know, what you do know is how much runway you have and you know when you're going to be cashed out and you can look at people's usage of your product and your revenue and have an idea of what it's going to take to survive. So that leads me to the second point that you brought up there, which is measure twice cut once. You've been on the phone. I am certain like all of us talking to CEOs, talking to founders about making cuts, about surviving.

what are you seeing out there? What are the nature of the conversations? What are people doing to survive until that rebound eventually comes, which could be some people believe three to six months, other people believe six to 12. And there are people believe this is a two-year story. Yeah. Well, I'll say one thing is that 100% of the companies are doing something. So no one is unaffected. and I think how it is affecting each company is very much on a case-by-case basis.

So you say, like, what's the net effect is, look, you know, in recessionary environments, which are like businesses down, and no matter, you know, however stable your business, I think of a company like, you know, chime, which is just core banking for, you know, everybody. And it's, you know, very horizontal public service. everybody needs a checking account. And like, you know, they will be affected, right? Everybody who has an account is spending less money on travel, entertainment, you know,

all of those categories. So like spend will be going down. And then some percentage of the population is losing their jobs, right? The jobless numbers came out and are just, you know, really scary. So those effects multiply and depending on the business that you're in, they will affect you in different ways. You know, some companies, ShipBob is another one that's in the e-commerce fulfillment space. I'm on the board of, you know, they have seen business, you know, be up a little bit so far, but obviously are very carefully watching things. And then others, uh, transportation

sector, obviously we're both, uh, you know, investors in Uber. Like, you know, that's obviously been affected dramatically because people are getting around a lot less. So I think just being very thoughtful about, hey, like, given the job that I have, like you mentioned earlier, you know, this is the role my company serves in the economy right now. What's the likely impact? And really taking, I think, of a new baseline because so many of these companies' decisions are based on data. You know, you're looking at, okay, I spend X on advertising how many companies hit my website, or sorry, how many customers hit my website, how many convert to a sub, how much value does each sub generate for me in terms of contribution margin, lifetime of value.

Those are the metrics that you use to make decisions in the business. And the world changed. So you now have to re-baseline, I think, all of those numbers. And so generally speaking, you know, we are advising our companies, you know, not to panic, but to plan very thoughtfully, right? Like if you had an aggressive hiring plan, you know, slow the hiring plan way down. if you still think, hey, you know, we are in a business that's going to either stay stable or benefit from this, like still hiring way down and just start measuring and make sure, you know,

if you were spending a lot on customer acquisition, you know, slow that way down, rebase line. And then as you see, hey, you know, these assumptions are still intact, then grow it back. Got it. And then some that where you know you're going to really get hit, unfortunately, you do all that you can, I think, tactically to be thoughtful, right? Some companies are furlowing saying, hey, have you. everybody, you know, go home for a couple months and collect unemployment. Some companies are reducing salaries and trying to take either blanket cuts across the teams or selective cuts

where people who can absorb it, you know, take greater cuts. And then, of course, the last case is, you know, you just need to trim the head count. And I think of it as being more like right-sized for the new reality, right? Like it's probably not going to zero, but, you know, to outlast the storm. All right. When we get back for this quick break, I want to talk a little bit more about the dry powder, so much money was raised by venture capital firms, and that is different than in some other downturns we've had, and the role that dry powder will play in the recovery when we get back on Angel. Season 4, episode 10, we made it to the end of the season.

Stick with us. Hey, everybody. Instead of me reading you copy in an ad about LinkedIn Talent Solutions, I thought, you know what be a great idea? Who made LinkedIn Talent Solutions? Who's the product manager? Give me the head of product. And let's talk about why this product is so awesome.

We've had so many great hires with me today. Blake Barnes, the head of product for LinkedIn Talent Solutions. Welcome to the pod. Thanks for having me. All right. Thanks for that. Hiring is a tough journey, right? I mean, we talked about how what you want to be doing is growing your business.

And you want to find your qualified candidates quickly. And so we're just always looking for ways to get you more information, get you more insight to help you to do that. Screening questions are one of that. You know, we also build our platform in a way that you pay for performance, right? So you don't pay one lump sum for when you're posting a job. You pay for the cannons that you receive. And then we build all sorts of smart things in the process to make it faster and easier.

So, you know, we talked about how candidates might not be the right fit. You sounds like you've experienced a fair share. I think everybody's experienced that way you're like, you come into the meeting and it's like, oh, wait a second. Is this a fit? And the person's like, no, it's not a fit. It's like, what do we do now? Let's talk for 20 minutes and gracefully at the meeting. You want to be able to filter the people that aren't a right fit out early.

earlier and you want to be able to let them know that it wasn't the right fit. It's only fair to let them hear back. Right. And so we can build, we've built tools using these screening questions, using automated systems that help you to automatically tell candidates that they're not the right fit for the role. Find the right person for your business today with LinkedIn jobs. You can pay what you want. And you get the first 50-5-0 for free from my man Blake. Just visit LinkedIn.com slash angel, A-N-G-G-E-L. Again, LinkedIn.com slash angel. And you get 50. 5-0 right now. Terms and conditions apply because they're giving you 50. Thanks again. Blake for coming on the pot. Thanks for this big stack of 50s here for me to give out to all the Twist fans and the intro fans.

Happy to be here and, of course, anytime. Welcome back to Angel the podcast. It's season four's final episode. Episode 10, Sean Carolyn, is with us from Menlo Ventures. He's been doing this for about 18 years. He knows what he's talking about. And probably a little underground. You don't do a lot of this podcasting and pontificating.

You kind of seem to me to be the guy who just puts his head down. does the meetings and does the work? Yeah? A bit. I have aspirations to be as talented as you on air, but I haven't gotten there yet. Yeah, I think it's better. I just had this brief discussion on Twitter. And they were like, God, this flood of advice from people who are like first-time venture

capital. So I was like, yeah, my advice is like probably the world, if you've been investing for under five or ten years and you don't have any unicorn, it's like, probably the world doesn't need your advice right now. like probably just do meetings and go to board meetings and be of service for five years maybe minimum maybe 10 and people were like didn't you start a podcast i was like i came from journalism like it's a little slightly different path but i really didn't start talking about like hey here's what i think about how you should invest until maybe see your seven eight or nine um one thing that's pretty

interesting to me and i'm trying to get a handle on is we have such large venture capital firms and so many venture capital firms out there. And I was talking to a very prominent LP, a limited partner who puts money in firms like yours and mine and others. And they said, yeah, if you raise your fund and you finished last year, great because there will be no new managers and very little checks being written or commitments being done to new funds. And we've had so many new funds.

It's got to be mind-blowing to you being one of like, you know, 20 stops on Sand Hill Road to being one of 200 or 300-0. Series A stops. I'm curious what you think will be the shakeout in the venture space and how your job has changed. There's two questions. What is the shakeout or how will venture capital be going forward in terms of all these new funds? And I'm also curious, how did your life change over the last decade when you were, again, one of 20 people at 3,000 or 2,800 Stantle Road to now one of 300 people fighting for that series A. You're a series A investor, and it used to be a short short list.

You go to Kleiner, you go to Sequoia, you go to benchmark, you go to Excel. It was just like a short list. You go to Manlo. Now it's just a giant list of people who might do your Series A. So how did your life change? And then what do you think of all this dry powder? Good question. So let's see.

On the shakeout side first, I mean, one thing that's unique about investing in the venture capital market versus companies, it's a much longer lag time between, you know, what are you doing as a business, right? Venture capital firms are in many cases just small businesses like a startup might be, you know, 20, 30 people maybe like even smaller, right? So if you're a startup and you're just executing poorly, then you're out of business pretty quick. You know, usually you have a year, year and a half a runway. And if you're just making bad decisions, hiring bad people, you know, not making your customers happy, then shows up in your metrics, and then nobody wants to fund you and you close up shop.

And through the nature of venture firms, usually an LP commitment, as you know, is like a 10-year commitment, right? So you raise a fund, and you have kind of a long time to either be doing, you know, bad work or not. And so, and then the numbers, even the companies you're picking, do they, do you advise them well, did you pick good entrepreneurs? Are you recruiting well for them? Like all of the blocking and tackling that goes into good execution to build a great company and serve customers well. Like there's just a lot of stuff that happens and it takes a long time for that to turn into

value. So I do feel like, you know, like in the bubble, it'll be a slow decline in some of these firms that you just see won't be raising their next fund and it'll go on to do other things. But I do think that's partly why, you know, when you see some of these institutions, or, you know, people who have been in the business for a long time that are, you know, have been through these things and are, you know, continuing to do what works. I think as you're in the industry for a long time, you see there's a lot of stuff like written about. And then there's these first principles fundamentals and you come back to like, hey, you know,

good unit economics of a business. So really important, right? Having scalable growth engine so that you grow is important, getting really clear on what your customer need is. Here's exactly the need that I serve and how I serve it. And you're really, you know, first line of talking to customers, understanding how the market's changing and making happy customers. So, you know, in some ways, business is very simple. And I think as an investor to continue to coach the companies on that, like that will show up over time in the results of the firm. And so I certainly think the capital markets are going to be contracting. There's going to be

fewer firms. There's going to be a lot less prior angel activity. I think individuals are are affected often, you know, more than the bigger pools of capital that are institutional.

And even the people who have the capital are going to slow the pace. So I think, you know, there will be a shakeout, but at least for the firms themselves, it'll be delayed. So that was first part.

And then part two was on just, you know, how the industry has gone so competitive. Yeah. And it's interesting. And I think of the level of competition varies with the stage of the company very much. Yes.

And, you know, one thing that has come from all of these incredible metrics toolkits, you know, the optimizes, the mixed panels, the heap analytics, etc., is like, it becomes pretty clear that, hey, this business is working or not. You know, you look at cohort retention graphs, you know, you look at contribution margins, you look at LTVs, cacks, et cetera. And you be like, hey, you know, this is a fantastic business or, man, you know, this thing is just not working. And so what that means is if you've been limping along for a while, you know, you have a business, you have a product and the metrics are bad, there's no competition. So I think, you know, that's an opportunity for good investors.

And then if you have all the metrics are working well, the kind of, competition is is extreme, right? Then you get in five, 10 term sheets. Prices are getting bit up. So it's almost like a, you know, a barbell in terms of demand for companies where, you know, that's where I think as a, what we try to do in these environments is keep, like you say, keep our head down and say, like, what are the next areas that are not, you know, all of the boxes aren't checked yet. And then let's focus our time there. And frankly, that's where you can actually add value as an investor instead of just being another, you know, check piling on and taking a ride with them. So a company that has all the boxes checked, like a Yammer did at the time or, say, a Slack did,

you know, just a bunch of SaaS companies where the lifetime value, the LTV you mentioned, is strong. The unit economics are strong. And you're saying, and the KAC customer acquisition cost is strong. All those things are dialed in. you're going to have too many people trying to go for that deal. It's going to get bid up. And then you're getting it at a higher price. So your returns are going to be muted on the back end when you sell.

But if you find somebody who's got, I don't know, if there's five of those metrics that are important, three of them are dialed in, two, three are dialed in, two, three left to dial in. You're saying that's where you can actually be of service. That's where you can do some damage because you're getting it at a fair price, maybe even below market. and you might have some upside there. So you're actually looking for imperfection in a way. Yeah. Yeah, I wouldn't, I don't know if I would go so far. As with all things, complex systems, there's no universals.

And so, look, you can still pay a high price in a round where the company has all the boxes checked and still produce great returns, right? I think you were very early in Uber as an angel. We led the B round, which felt like a high price at the time. That's $300 million. right? Yeah, for being in, you know, four cities with a black car service, right? Yeah, people thought you were very dumb for doing that investment. That was, you know, set a few times.

Literally people laughed. Like, Uber went from, was a series A like 40 or 50? I think it was, yeah, 50 with 10 from benchmark, yeah. Yeah, so maybe 60 post, I'm not sure. But it went 5X, and I think the time between those two moments was six months or nine months. I mean, it was a very quick A to B moment. Yeah, we were November 11. Take me to that decision-making process in November of 11 of this is a very high price, but we're going to pay it. And we're okay looking, let's face it, stupid in some people's minds for overpaying

for a cab company in four markets. What was the discussion around the table? It was not a straightforward one. I mean, there were times where he thought, oh, my God, this price is just too high. You know, we can't do it. And I'd say a couple things got us there. One was, especially I find this with consumer products, and that's where I focus most of my time. And I think of the area that I cover as utilitarian consumer is, you know, what are the jobs to be done in a consumer's life?

And then how does a piece of technology come into their life? and service that job in a better, faster, cheaper way. And so, you know, when you're evaluating a company like that, there's no substitute for living the product. And I was on the second floor of a flat in San Francisco and had pushed the button by the time I walked down on the street, there was a car there waiting, you know, get in, no tip. It was just this incredibly magical experience.

And that was for me what sort of flipped it, where I went from, oh, this is too pricey to just, that was consumer perfection. You know, for this particular use case, which is I am at point A, I need to get to point B. It's a use case that everybody has all the time. That experience basically could not have gotten better. And then we modeled it as, okay, let's just say they get 25% of the taxi market. What size of a business is that?

I felt like they could. And, of course, it way outperformed that model. I think they're, you know, 10x the size of the taxi. taxi markets at some and and you know uber x came after that and uber eats came after that and you know the micromobility jump bikes came after that so but it was i think a combination of yeah just incredible experience you know doing some amount of modeling that says okay because it's such a great experience let's look at the existing market and see what percentage of the market they could seize and then the third was an internal benchmarking process that we've had in place for

you know decade plus of just looking again and we talked about these fundamental metrics And, you know, after you evaluate thousands of companies a year across the team, you know, you see clusters of patterns. And Uber was truly off the charts, you know, a couple, one of the two-by-toos is LTV over CPA, so lifetime value, what is, you know, the contribution margin of the consumer's relationship with the business over time. And then CPA being, you know, how, how much did it cost you to acquire that customer? So at that time, it was growing virally. People were just talking about it.

You get to the place. Oh, my God, Uber was amazing. You'd give them rides to each other. There was this, you know, give one, get one, get a ride, give a ride free, take a ride free for your friends. So it was growing virally. And then the revenue per customer was, it just immediately replaced all of your taxi spend. It wasn't yet, I think, replacing. So we're talking about hundreds of dollars a month.

and the cost was tens of dollars to acquire somebody. So you start looking at that two by two matrix. This is the X, Y, with four quadrants. And you're like, this is thousands of dollars in spend per year. So you want the revenue to be high. And then the cost to be low. Yeah. So the cost to service that revenue, I mean, you know,

a whole other story about customer acquisition, how much you spend on that. I won't get into the nuances of the business model yet. But you say, okay, I'm a software company, right? You think of the Uber was really driver app, rider app, and they had to, you know, insurance and call centers and some costs. But relatively speaking, when you collect, let's just call it, you know, 20% of the overall ticket price for that service. I mean, that's a very good business model. Right.

And so that's the contribution margin. The CAQ was essentially viral growth at that point. And so, you know, free customer acquisition. And then the growth rate, you know, you could look at month over. month and it was 20, 30% growth per month, which was still a pretty high-end service as black cars, right? It was bonkers. Travis at the time had a bigger vision for transportation as easy as running water and all

that stuff. So it was one of those where you said, like, look, I don't know exactly how this is going to turn out, but this is a super unique property, you know, really impressive, like the way they ran the data. And as we all know, Travis is the force of nature. So, you know, this is an entrepreneur who's going to just work really hard against these taxi lobbies. When we get back, I want you to give me some thoughts on the founder archetypes. You just tipped us off on one, the force of nature.

I wish you to think about some of those other founder archetypes and maybe talk about some of the other big hits in your portfolio, including Siri. The voice assistant that Apple bought. Most people think it was built in house. It was not when we get back on Angel podcast, season four, episode 10. If you're an accredited investor, you need to understand what a special purpose vehicle is. You might hear me say it all the time. An SPV. We're doing an SPV.

We're popping up at SPV for this investment we're doing. What is that? It's a special purpose vehicle that allows you to have up to 250 accredited investors in one group on one line item in a cap table. Invest up to $10 million in a startup. So if you're an angel investor, you've got a bunch of rich friends. you could start your own syndicate like the syndicate.com, and you could power it with an SPV

from our friends at Assure. Assure is the leading provider of special purpose vehicles and fund administration with over $2.5 billion in AUA assets under administration and over 5,000

completed transactions, of which we are hundreds. They have developed a very innovative platform called Glassboard to automate the entire investment experience from entity formation all the way through to an IPO. It's slick and it's beautiful. And Ashley, who manages our syndicate here, loves the interface. Not only do investors love it, but founders love it as well because it keeps their cap table nice and clean and simple, easy-peasy. They also manage the entire process over the life of the entire investment. So if you

hold that investment for five or ten years, the team at Assure, ASS-U-R-E is going to take care of it for you. To get 20% off your first special purpose vehicle, again, SPV, just visit ashore.co slash angel, a ss, u.r.com, slash angel, that's assure.com slash angel. To get 20% off your first SPV. And thanks for supporting season four of Angel. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, Sean Carolyn did not invest in my business back in the day, but he was very kind to me. Do you remember that meeting? Do you remember meeting me? I sure do. I think I had love. with your whole team.

Yeah. And you asked me, you know, what do you like about my company? Is that what I said? In front of everybody. So it was an interesting kind of judo move where at that point I was, you know, selling Menlo and selling your team on the vision. That's hilarious. I thought there was a lot that was compelling about the vision.

So you know, I get excited about things. It was a really interesting vision, I think, because I had seen Naver, the search engine in Korea, because my wife's Korean. and I started down and I was like you know search can be more than 10 blue links and Google sucked

at the time with all this web spam and I said you know what Wikipedia's got the software what if we put that software I made a search engine and we just had 20 links and the original name was going to be 20.com

then it became Mahalo.com and it really got to people forget I got to $10 million run rate within 18 months or 24 months just on Google and then Google just pressed a button

and just got rid of 80% of our traffic and it really was like it really was a big lesson for me now as an investor like, man, if you've got a dependency on a single source of traffic and you start tall poppy syndrome, like they're going to cut you down. And they cut everybody down. Google just was like, you know what, ehow, how to, this thing, that thing. Everybody's cut, except for Wikipedia,

which is not competing with us in any way. That's right. It was so, anybody with the search box, they were coming for you. Well, they also put the search box. They also put the one box. So what they started to do was they started to pull the answer from your website and put. at the top under their ads. And I was like, oh my God, Google's the most cut throw company. And they're so nice to you. Like, they literally were giving us $10 million from one side in Google Adsense. And on the other side, Matt Cuts took away all the traffic.

And I was like, we're partners. How could you do this? He's like, we're not partners. We don't have partners. I'm like, and I forwarded him email that said like partnership meeting. Can you come up and we'll buy you lunch and we want to show our thanks as a partner? And he's like, well, that's a different part of the business. I was like, you're both at google.com.

It was hilarious. Big company. But when we talk about the founder archetypes, you had me coming in there. I don't know what bucket I fall into, maniac, especially at that time. I was pretty crazy. But Travis is a force of nature. You get the sense that you're never going to have to worry about some roboc that Travis is not going to get through, knock over, go around, lift over his head, and body slam over his knee and crack in half.

That's not why that business is going to have a problem. And you see it now with Cloud Kitchens. It's nothing that's going to stop that kid. You're not getting roadblocks out of his way. You're dealing with, if anything, the aftermath of him smashing through a wall and a bunch of bricks laying around somebody complaining that he broke their wall, you know, like the taxi commission or something. What was it like having him as a founder in the portfolio and him just blowing through walls like that

and the regulation back at the time where the, the criticism people forget this was oh my god they're breaking the rules you know people are going and picking people up in their own personal cars and what was it like to have that kind of portfolio founder yeah it's interesting question because like we were talking about before you know if you're looking at a business as an investor and they don't have 10 term sheets like there's something that's not perfect about it right and I think all companies and all humans have many things that are not perfect about them. And I think what you're trying to do is,

is think of, okay, based on this problem at hand, you know, does this founder, does this founding team have the assets to execute on that? Some people call that founder market fit. But it really is important because different businesses require different unique skill sets in order to be great at them. Like if you took the Google founders and you said, hey, go run Pinterest.

They do a terrible job, right? that was a very sort of design-centric company. And so, you know, I think when you see in that case, you know, with Uber, like, had to be extremely analytically driven because it's really easy to just send people to the wrong place. So they had just incredible GPS-based analytics to dispatch drivers to the right place. So, you know, my first meeting at the company there was this, the P called it the math department. And it was, you know, a bunch of PhDs.

Even if it was a super tiny company, I don't know. 10, 15 people at the time, if I remember right, there was a math department and it was a sign on the wall and you go over and you see heat maps of San Francisco and where people are opening in the app and they're like, okay, you need that because there is this taxi lobby. And, you know, I remember, I think it was a Paul Graham tweet at the time, which is the harder you fight against Uber, the more corrupt your government is. Yep. Which I think pretty clearly summed up.

like, look, you know, if Uber is, is ensuring the drivers and is, if Uber is doing, you know, their best at least better than taxis to, you know, safety and scrutiny and all that stuff, you know, screening, then it's just a more efficient model, right? Like, because of technology, you just have a driver, hey, once I'm on the clock, I'm busy, you know, 80, 90% of the time. And that's, you know, one of the kind of insights was rather than, like, somebody sitting around, sitting around 90%. time and driving 90% of time. It's just a bunch of mentally better, yeah, utilization, better economics.

And so, you know, to introduce a service like that where there is, you know, lobbies and medallions and all these things, you did need a force of nature to grow, you know, that quickly. And of course, there was also an Achilles heel to that, you know, going, you know, too far and not necessarily listening to concerns employees head and other things like that, which we don't have to go into now. But I think generally speaking, when that's the key part is this, you know, based on the job to be done with for the company, what are the things that a founder has that are unique to that? And then, of course, there's just general, you know, founder principles that are goodness, right? So authentic motivation, which I thought you had is, is this person really coming at this from a deep seated place in their soul? Because, you know, you're going to have to jump through barriers and punch through walls and whatever else. And if you don't have that like intrinsic. motivation. It's just like, ah, you know, this isn't working. I'm going to go on to

something else. You're going to give up. You're to fold. That's right. Yeah. So that's key. I think the suited to the opportunity hand. The execution, right? Like there's people with good ideas. And if you're just not like whichever earlier, you know, putting your head down and walking through your list and getting stuff done and delegating and whatever else, like just, you know, no good idea is going to turn into anything without really good execution. So you have to be able to execute. I think, you know, the capital markets are real and hiring employees are real. You have to be, you know, some amount of storytelling and strategic long-term vision. How do you communicate what the future holds and get people excited about that is important? There's a dimension of like self-awareness

and humility. Do you feel like, hey, I've got all the answers all the time, or am I willing to subject my ideas, my plans to the scrutiny of a board and the scrutiny of my team and get the best information I can out of everyone around me. Customer empathy is also like all great founders are really listening to here's what people love about my product. Here's what they don't. I'm really going to focus on, you know, making that better. And then probably the last one I'd say is focus. And this is where I probably made my biggest mistakes as a founder. I think you may have known at some point during the Menlo journey, I had an idea for a company called Handel started that. that and tried to do too much.

It was the idea was, hey. What was handle? It was the mission statement was helping people spend their life on the important things. We came at it, you know, at the time I was on the board of Syria. I said, what if Siri was in your email inbox? I, of course, was spending the majority of my week processing email. And you'd see these notes and you'd say like, oh, you know, this is related to this project. This one's due that day.

This one I want to hand off to this person and have them do it for me. And so there was this whole layer of metadata on top of the email inbox that you're unable to express with mark and red flag or put in a folder. So that was the original impetus was, man, if we could just get this metadata model on top of email, let you process it and then handle it, then it would be great. And I think I screwed up. I look back at that and many and many lessons learned. But the biggest screw up was just to have laser focused on just. that. If I just said like stick with the email and instead I, you know, email and then, hey, this is an important email. Well, that's a to do list. And then I've got a to do list. Well,

when am I going to get my two to this done? That's a calendar. And then there's this workflow. And then there's, you know, cross platform. And with a team of, you know, 10 or 15 people, you really have to pick your battles. And so I think that's kind of the last one. So you tried to build the office suite before you had Microsoft Word done. Basically. That's right. Or I had a Happy version of word. Yeah, let me get on spreadsheets before I have the, you know, the bold and the italics. And, you know, it's really interesting email is such a big target. And I love big target.

I look big, big markets. And you look at what superhuman did. It's not, it's, it's, when I hear your pitch, it's kind of similar to the superhuman pitch, which is, hey, we spend, we live in email. Can it be better than Gmail? Right. And it's a big, bold pitch. And in order to do it, I've been begging. You know, like it took me, it was very interesting with Superhuman because I was on the board in the early period, or not officially, but, uh, I don't know what was official?

Anyway, I was going to board meetings in the original days. And, uh, they, um, they didn't have an iPad version. And all VCs use iPad pros. And so you go to a board meeting, well, the VCs take out their iPad pros. And he's like, yeah, it's Chrome only. And he's like, we have to nail Chrome. We got to get Chrome. That's the most universal.

Yeah. that people like then he's like here's the statistics of people using the product I was like all right fuck this you know I got to be a good board member so I got a Chrome book and I was like if we're going to go be Chrome I'm going to get the Chrome book from Google out of the draw yeah that they had sent me and I'm going to just use that and so I wanted to be number one on the leaderboard for usage amongst the board members so I just like all right iPad Pro right in the garbage boom I started doing the Chrome book and just starting using there and then of course the iPad pro comes out everything comes out and I've been riding him like oh where is my multi user I want to

I want to do multi-user. I want to have snippets. You know, like we have those little snippets of like, thanks for pitching men lo. Future request list for email is unlimited. Yeah. But he's getting there.

And, you know, it's whatever. I think we're in year three now. And boy, that talk about a series B, that was competitive. Woof. Yeah,

he had massively won it. And Drason Horowitz, I don't even know if I can't speak to it. It's about my company. I shouldn't say details. But, but Jason Horowitz got the deal. But boy,

that was a, I was a, that was competitive. I'm sure you looked at it as well. what did you think looking at it having had your own battle scars in email? Did you get a little deja vu all over again, as they say? It did. It was a little bit too close to home.

I kind of laugh sometimes because, you know, we started Handel in kind of late 11, early 12, started hiring the team. And that was before Accompli, mailbox, superhuman. Front. Sunrise front. Yeah. So it was kind of sniffing in the right area, but just, you know, first time. founder, first time product manager and made too many mistakes. But I'm very impressed with that team.

Conrad Irwin, who I think is their CTO now, had done some contract work for handles the time. But I think this is where one of the key, you know, I talked about the focus, but you say, well, how do you focus? It's a pretty vague word. And one of the key frameworks I've come to use often with founders, especially early on in their journey, is this job to be done. and Cleton Christensen and some other people have written about it quite a bit.

But I haven't seen it applied too much. And some of the big product companies, I know Instagram uses this, Dropbox, uses it. But in terms of a tool for investing, I haven't seen it applied very much. And I really have become a strong advocate in Trulia Menlo, but it has to do with the users, the situation, motivation, and the context. And you get really laser clear on what is the moment. in their life that you were intercepting. So that's kind of like the time dimension or what is the dollar that they're spending that

you're intercepting. That's the money dimension. Each of us is humans. We have two scarce resources, time and money. And I have a new product. And again, this is the utilitarian angle, not new fashion or new, you know, cool piece of video or whatever else. But if I'm a utility, then what is the minute or the dollar that I'm intercepting?

And if you can get super clear on that, then. it becomes very focusing because then the user kind of just adopt you for that small part of their life. And then you have earned the right to grow in your scope. So you mentioned, you know, Gmail versus superhuman. I think what they did is to say, hey, you know, when you are at your desktop, for a while, they didn't have mobile. And you need to process your inbox. That's kind of the situation.

This is a faster way to, you know, plow through your inbox. But there's a whole bunch of features that has to come along with that. has to be fast. You need reply, reply all, this, that, the other thing. Like, there's so many things you have no idea that are part of an email client. Just parsing inbound emails, you know, unicode and embedded images and attachments like, mine. I mean, it's, yeah, it's like mind-boggling how deep it is. So I think when, you know, I talked to early stage founders, I'm really, really, really hard on, look, you know, what's the rest of the world doing? What is your unique, new value add in the world and how can you do the smallest, the absolutely smallest set of things in order

to complete this one job well? And I think I can go back to basically every consumer success and point to what that story was. You know, chime. I'm the best bank account. Jump. I'm the fastest way to get around a busy city. I'm talking about some of my hit list, right? Like Roku, I'm sitting at a TV and I want to watch the world of internet video. And, you know, those are the things that when you see a behavior pattern that's so broad, and then you come up with, here's just a better mousetrap for servicing that behavior pattern, then you have a really, I think, big... When we get back from this final break, I want to unpack those two big hits, Syria and Roku. We get back on Angel.

Episode 10, season four. There is enough uncertainty to go around right now. NetSuite will help you reduce all of that by giving you visibility and control into your business. You have a lot of critical decisions to make, and you're going to need the right numbers. You're going to need that instrument panel to really be able to fly the plane properly. And you need those numbers. Now, you're in the thick of it. Well, NetSuite by Oracle is the world's number one cloud business system.

With NetSuite, you get all of your financials, cash flow, payroll, inventory, and more, all in one place. So you have crystal clear visibility and total control of your business, and you can make the moves that you need to make in a crisis and in order to grow out of the crises. NetSuite customers have the flexibility to work from anywhere with immediate clarity on critical information right at their fingertips. There's no more guessing. There's no more waiting. You can make smarter decisions with confidence because you've got crystal clear visibility to all the numbers. Join over 20,000 companies who trust NetSuite to stay in control of their business. Here is your CTA, the old call to action.

You're going to receive your free guide, managing business uncertainty. And this is a new guide that you need to get. And you can schedule your free product tour right now at, net suite.com slash angel. That's right, net suite.com slash angel. Don't wait. Get your free guide and schedule your free product tour at net suite.com slash angel. Thank you so much, NetSuite, for supporting independent media like this week in startups in the Angel series. We could not do it without you.

All right. Come around the horn. Segment four, Sean Carolyn is with us. He's Sean VC with N. And he is a managing partner at Memental Adventures from 2002 to today. He rounds up An incredible class for season for season four Sarah Cannon of Index Dan Rose from Coteau

George Zachry from CRV Sarah Taville from Bench Ajay from Bain Nicole from Lightspeed David from Bessemer Sarah from Greylock and Jeff from GGV What a lineup

You know some of those folks I'm sure I'm work with them Sean Absolutely good people Good people got a great We had a good season That's a great season Thanks to our partners Who brought it together

Really great to talk With these fine people Take me through Siri and Roku. How did you meet them? Tell me about the tingle you got. Tell me about that Uber tingle you got. You know, you use the product and you got that tingle talked about earlier. Yeah, sure. Siri is, it was an interesting one because like I think so many things in technology, you don't, it's not a straight line. So we were looking at three different thesis areas. One was voice as a user interface. Right. How do I, look, I type 80 words a minute.

on a smartphone, on 40 words a minute, on a spoken word, I can talk 160 words a minute. So if I can interact with the computing device, with my voice, that's good. So that was one. Two was this thing. You probably remember this Jason called smarter child. What was that one? No. It was a chatterbot that was on AOL Instant Messenger.

You added it as a friend. Oh, yes. And you could say, what's my horoscope today? Yes. Should I dump my boyfriend? And it was basically like a magic eight. ball. Yeah.

You know, the responses were, or in a name. But I think at the time, it was 17 million users and like a billion messages it was getting per month. So like that, you know, you're a student of the market. So that's something. So there's this voice UI, which is kind of forced first principles base, this chatterbot, which was like observation of humanity. And then the third one was what I think of is, sometimes being called Web 3.0,

but these APIs going back and forth. And people may not remember. but Siri launched as an app and the idea was, hey, this is a virtual assistant. You could book tables or movies or find out the weather, like anything that you wanted to complete, instead of going to Google, getting a search engine digital page back and then doing your thing,

you just speak. Siri knew your identity, had your credentials, would log you in and do the thing. And so in many ways, the vision that Siri had still is not fully realized. But, you know, just those things coming together.

And then I met this founding team, Doug Kitless, Adam Shire, and Tom Gruber, who had been working on a project inside of SRI called Kalo, the cognitive assistant that learns and organizes. Explain what SRI. What's that? Explain SRI. SRI is a research lab in Menlo Park. They do a lot of work for the government.

And there's this, I think it's the Bar Dole Act, if I remember right, where if you use government funds, DARPA in this case, to produce something for the government. government, but there's a use in consumer land, then you can move forward with that IP. And that's what they had done. So they had done all of this. They were, this is where nuance was born as well, it was out of SRI. But they had done all of this IP around language parsing, which is incredibly complex, you know, just within three or four words, you have millions or billions of permutations for what it might actually mean. So they had done this work to parse language and understand, you know, help knowledge workers in the armed services. So they,

They were able to use that technology to launch Siri and Dog and team had this vision for the virtual assistance. So when having looked at all of these different companies in each of those spaces, when I met Dog and Adam and the Kalo project and the demo they had, which at the time was called Hal in honor of the space Odyssey instead of Siri, it was like, wow, you know, these guys nail it. It's not obviously one of those ideas that you think. It's like, when will this happen?

Not if this happens. Of course I'm going to talk to a computer. It's going to do things for me. And that's a deep tech kind of problem because it's not like there was an obvious, okay, yeah, my Lincoln town car is downstairs. I need a Lincoln town car to go to the airport, you know, in the Uber case or, yeah, no, I was going to call the restaurant and tell them my order over the phone and wait on hold and tell them my gentle sauce chicken and then it's going to come maybe and maybe not. And I got to call the restaurant three more times. there was no it wasn't replacing anything in your life right that's right that you could really pinpoint say okay people are willing to pay 10 bucks a month for this right and even today it's

still not um there's still no business model for it other than increasing utilization for very large companies that are making a decade long bet on it correct well i would argue as you bring down friction right in consumer interactions people will do it more often sure probably the way I would think about it. And so look at, you know, Amazon, on the Alexa, on my counter. And I use, you know, both right now, series, I think, in a billion hands. But, you know, they inside of Apple, which acquired them, you know, a few years later, I think it was 2011. We invested in 2007 and it got built into the OS.

They stripped off all the third-party services. And didn't get back to that for a very long time. So I feel like for sure Siri team running independently would have done what Alexa has done and then some. But anyway, if the things on the counter and you can just say, oh, what are some garbage bags, or order this or that, because the friction has gone down and I'm not running back to my PC and type in this and type of that, you just do more free-order more. You should. Yeah.

But it's- The more, you know, the better, faster, cheaper it can be, the better. And there, like, let's just say finding a service, there's a lot of work that goes into research. But imagine if I could just say, you know, travel was one of the use cases they wanted to flesh out. If I could just say, geez, I need to go somewhere. this weekend that's, you know, open and within a 30-minute drive where it's very, you know, sparsely populated and I can keep my social distancing. Like the dream was something like that. You could have the machine parse all this world of metadata. And then all of a sudden you may have yourself

a great Airbnb room in the woods all alone. Whereas if I had to do all that internet research and 45 minutes later I hadn't found it, you just wouldn't transact. You'd stay in your house. Yeah. But you had to make that investment with no, discernible business model coming in 12 months or 24 months? That's, it was going to take a couple years to get the tech right. For sure, if you think about it as you will transact through this platform, you will buy stuff, you will book tables. Was that the original pitch in that in that series A investment was, hey, eventually it would be

like open table or Expedia? It would be, we will be a very important affiliate of them. If you look at like a, let's say a honey or somebody who's in the transaction stream. Got it. And get some credit for that. You know, if you are the one who facilitates the commerce coming to that party, then, you know, you get a piece of that action. Got it.

Take me through the Roku investment. I'm curious about that. And then Roku, I think, too, is, you know, all these things, they kind of look good at the end, but they always happen in fits and starts. So our very first investment, and it was my first board. See was 2004, a company called Cinema Now, which was down in L.A., and a spinoff from TriMarkmark Studios and had movie rights for Internet distribution. But at the time, the technology would only let you get to the PC.

So this was before Netflix was streaming. And it was, again, one of these things. It's not if it's when movies will stream over the internet, like instant start, bigger selection, better recommendations. It was very clear what was going to happen. And Cinema now just, you know, basically never got to the out of their way. They were relying on the Microsoft DRM platform, yada, yada, yada. So I had been following Roku and Anthony Wood, the founder is six-time founder, talk about founder market fit.

He had invented the DVR at replay TV. I had been going to these cinema now board meetings and saying, you know, where is the $99 device that gets us to the big screen? Because you're watching a two-hour movie, you want to sit back and have your popcorn or whatever else. That's why we have a couch. That's why we got a big screen. That's right. That's what a couch for it.

And the big screen, despite, you know, the little screens. I still like watching a movie, you know, I spent $4,000 on this big screen and $10,000 on this couch. Like, where's the $99 device that lets me watch to stream to it? That's a really profound insight. So it was May of 2008. Yeah. And I saw, I think it was just, you know, a blog article.

And it was, hey, Netflix player by Roku. So it was a $99 device. All it did was stream Netflix, but didn't have a hard drive. So the bomb was low. Netflix has set up their infrastructure all around streaming. Netflix had all these customers. And it just, it was one of these things because you have a prepared mind. And that's what a lot of this thesis work does.

It kind of gets you ready so that when you see it, you know this is the answer. And Anthony and the team he had assembled his founding team, like it just felt like, yes, like this is it. And, you know, he had a vision for, okay, after Netflix, we're going to open up this channel store. We weren't so far. And they are now as to say, we're going to embed it as an OS inside of TVs, which is where most of their, you know, new devices are coming from now. But definitely the vision of becoming the platform for streaming video was there. And, you know, this was a great, great place to get

started. And now it's, yeah, a $13 billion market cap company publicly traded. It was, they went public in 17. So I was on the board for almost 10 years, you know, with him. We were kind of a lonely investor for a number of years because it was a hardware company. It didn't look very sexy, but I always believed in the thesis. Did Roku have a subscription service ever, or is it just passing through other services? They would, that was part of the strategy was let us be a vessel to you, great content provider to come to the TV.

And in that way, this sort of Switzerland strategy got a lot of different content parties to embrace them as a platform and get them to it. They do now have a free service called Roku TV where they cut their own deals and then do bad support, but it's still, you know, thousands and thousands of channels, a majority of the content hours is, again, these partners. It's almost free now. What does it cost for a Roku? Like, there's like $50 ones, $30, $79?

There's sticks that are just go straight into the H.D.MI port, and I think those are 29. That is amazing. Like, I was on vacation and we were going to be in L.A. for two weeks over the holiday, like, two years ago. And I was like, oh, my God, this is like just a dead TV here with like cable vision or whatever. And I did, I guess Google had a same day. service or maybe it was Amazon's. I just did a same day service and got a roco stick, plugged it in, authenticated everything. And I was like, oh my God, I literally need to throw this in my bag now.

And when I'm on the road, you can travel with it. Just travel with a Roku stick and just go from there. What do you think of the number of startups being created? You see like, I think Techstar is now on a global basis doing over 400 investments a year. And Y Combinator's Demo Day has gotten large. They split it into two or three days, maybe it was three days this last time. And a bunch of founders getting up for two minutes and screaming into a microphone that their tam is going to be, $50 trillion. And oh my God, we're the hottest thing since I sliced bread. Do you even go to demo days anymore? And is that the way Series A investors interface? Or do you just wait for the companies to bubble up because there's just way too many seed state startups?

Yeah, very good question. There's just, I find it almost impossible to see everything. thing these days. Obviously, you know, we hire, have a, have a great team that's out there, including ourselves. And we do go to demo days and obviously not in person, but virtually now and see as much as we can. But, you know, inbound referrals are still super important, right? Here's a high quality signal coming in. And then thesis work. Like what I was talking about with Siri, with Roku, I think of like a, you know, jump bikes, which was super early micro mobility company that ended up going back to Uber. Like, you know, these are, these come out of thesis work. where you say, look, the ingredients are now there for a disruption to happen to this market.

I call them ingredient technologies. But you think of, you know, before GPS on the phone, before broadband data on the phone, before the app store, before telephony API in the cloud, Uber was not possible. Right. You think of, you know, Garrett whipping up this app. And it being, you know, the first app was terrible. I don't know when you invested. It was a really ugly little thing. Ubertaxies.com?

Yeah. But those ingredients. This is a Lincoln Town car. Why are we calling it Uber taxi? Why don't we just call it Uber? Uber is like a similar name. So it was kind of like those pieces had to be there before the market could be disrupted. And so a lot of our thesis work stems on that.

And we actually have this program called Menlo Labs where, hey, you kind of say there's a problem here that's ready to be solved. The ingredients are now in place for something to happen here. And we just try and get smart. You know, we don't necessarily feel like we need to create the company or, you know, hire the founders or whatever else. If we find a company that, hey, there's one founder that needs another co-founder or it's an early stage company or even, you know, we have an inflection fund, which does late stage investments.

It's kind of off to the race. It's like, we just want to, you know, put the capital in the company that's going to win. But sometimes you see these problems when you're doing these thesis work and you form a opinions on this is what it's going to take to win, all of the different fundamentals, like I talked about before, you know, important problem, uniquely capable team, scalable growth engine and compelling unit economics. Those four fundamentals come together in a way that you sort of unlock this problem at scale for the world, and that's how you create these enormous companies.

And when you looked at jump bikes, micromobility, you had talked earlier that unit economics were important. But in those businesses, it seemed like unit economics. economics were bad, how did you make that decision to invest and are in fact the union economics in micromobility bad and not solvable now that we're looking at it, whatever, five years after these investments? Yeah, that's a great question. So one of the things, you're never investing for like today, right?

You know, I'm probably going to be in this investment five years, maybe 10 years. So you're investing for, okay, you know, what are reasonable projections going forward for what will happen to the economics. And if I think of like at the time we invested in jump bikes, the bikes were $1,200. But you saw viral growth again because there are these red billboards running around the city. People are happy that are moving faster. We did a race between a scooter, a jump bike, and an Uber to get across town as part of

our diligence. And I smoked everybody on the jump bike, almost killed myself running through some red lights. But at the time, it was like, okay, $1,200 bucks of CAPEX. But if the business model is working capital is pretty cheap, you can get access to debt lines, et cetera, and people would ride, you know, two to five dollars per ride. And so if you get to density and these things, you know, get a lot of rides, then you're kind of paying off the CAPEX and you have to repair them and you have to move them around. So just did that whole equation get together. And I think what's happened is a lot of these companies in micro mobility have scaled ahead of good unit economics, which is why they've had to burn through so much cash. But the demand is absolutely there. Like if you have a fleet first vehicle, and especially in the scooter market, this has not been the case. A lot of these companies scaled on what was a consumer grade vehicle. Then it gets stolen. Then it breaks.

Yeah. You know, then. So you need to have one that's made for the purpose, which is 10 riders a day for a thousand days and easy repair, field repair. And they used, and this is why I think Bird looks pretty good to me because they came out with their own scooters, right? they have their own product now. Yeah. But still challenging. These are just a...

It's still hard. And we have an investment company called Skip that built their own great scooter. There's an ownership model where, hey, you know, it's a personal off asset. I want to use it for my own commute, right? And I don't want to find myself at the end of my train stop without a way to go. I take my Unagi scooter as another seed investment of ours, like take that to work and back. So when you see the demand being there, then it's like, okay, how do we execute well to not just burn through tons of cash before we can

get the economics to make sense? What are the silver linings coming out of the crisis we're in right now for founders? So assume you survive and we're sitting here in the fourth quarter, everybody's back at restaurants, but with social distancing, maybe people are wearing masks to work. And the unemployment goes, you know, up to 30 percent and then back down to, or goes to 30 million and back down to five. And I think the unemployment number, I just want to touch on this because you mentioned it was quite staggering. I think it was six million claims last week or something like that. I don't know if I got that right. Nick, you can look it up. But there was two million on one day.

What people don't realize about that number is that could ultimately mean that more companies will survive. So if companies are in fact furlowing people laying them off or letting them go to rehire them so they can keep their company alive. So if you're a restaurant business, if you keep everybody employed and you pay them for the next six weeks, you're out of business. If you furlough everybody in week two

and you have those five weeks of runway back, you can pay your rent, keep the lights on, pay for your equipment leases or maybe renegotiate those, and then in six weeks or 12 weeks, the government pays for that unemployment and you get to rehire those people.

So the higher the unemployment number right now, the greater the chance in my mind that some of those businesses survive. so I'd be more concerned if the unemployment number wasn't high and people were running their companies off the cliff. Do you think my observation is in any way valid? I do. I do to your point. Like you say what's the silver lining? I mean, in addition to just, I think, much greater empathy for humanity and appreciation for health care system and how, you know, the heroic work that they do, I do feel like getting back to basics and, you know, here's exactly.

what I need to do to be successful. Here's exactly the team that I need, you know, sharpening the pencil. There's the capital markets obviously are contracting, so there's going to be a lot less competition. So if you are one of the survivors, you know, you will have built a business with good fundamentals. I think that's what happens. I see in a lot of these markets that are too crazy is companies just keep raising, you know,

big rounds and frankly, they get run in a very sloppy way. There's just tons of people. doing tons of things that are really not on mission. And that's defocusing. You know, that means you're not doing fewer things better. Are you doing more things worse? And management bandwidth is always going to be limited, right? So I think, you know, making sure just you're retrenching and, okay, here's what I do in the world and I'm going to do this really well and I'm going to get, you know, the best people that I could possibly find. We're going to be a tight-knit team and, you know, get through this together. I think, you know, we'll pay dividends over the world.

long-term. I wonder, because people are saying, you know, hey, this is, it's, this is going to change life forever. Life will never be the same. You know, and I heard that after the doc on bus 9-11 and the Great Recession. And then I was still going to Knicks and Warriors games. I was still going to restaurants and still getting sushi and still flying around the world. Nothing changed. Except when I look back, maybe it was a little bit harder on the margins to get a mortgage or maybe not, maybe for like the top, that last 3% of people maybe who shouldn't have been buying homes, who were getting suckered into it. And then maybe my wait at the TSA was 20 minutes and then I got clear in TSA,

whatever the TSA version of Clear is, what do they call that one? Global entry. So we kind of reversed all of that. And then in over 10 years and now you can go. through fast again if you get some biometrics done. So looking back on it, nothing's changed. Like literally, mortgage crisis, 9-11, nothing fundamentally has changed. So is it possible we get through this and nothing fundamentally changes and people don't wash their hands and, you know, don't wear masks or maybe we do now stop for the love of God's shaking hands? The only,

The way I can imagine it truly returning to 100% normalcy would be essentially 100% effective vaccine. Yes. Which is 50-50. That's right. And even, you know, I get my flu shot every year and still sometimes, you know, get a mild version of the flu. And so that's, I mean, say like, okay, what's going to actually change things from where it is today? It's not just more hospital beds. I mean, obviously that's treating the symptom, but nobody wants to be.

you know, sick coughing on malaria, yada, yada, yada. So it's really like to go to the root cause. It's, you know, here's this protein that exists in the world today, this little COVID thing, or sorry, coronavirus that creates COVID in humans. Until we have either treatments that are approaching 100% effective where if you get it, okay, just take this, right? You know, nobody feels like they're going to die of a, of a bacterial infection anymore because you've got great antibiotics. So you're not too careful. Or, you know, vaccine, right? Like polio, measles, et cetera. We've got vaccines now we get and we don't ever think about that. So I think that's, to me, until you have some combination of those two, super highly

effective treatments or a vaccine that inoculates the majority of the population. Or let's assume we're able to, you know, flatten the curve and mitigate it. So it's not like this, you know, we all get to go back to work. What do you think the next couple of years will be like for founders. The economic recovery time frame is tricky, right? Because this is where, again, I don't, flattening the curve is, we're just, you know, we're socially distanced. And so it's going to play out a normal distribution of who already has it. But we don't want that. You know, we don't want to keep life as it is. We want to get back to work. We want to socialize again. We want to go out to eat. We want to do. So that's the part where because these treatments are going to

take a long time and you're not until you go back to you think of I'm an NBA player and I used to fill a stadium with 10,000 people and there was concessions. They're like until I can get back to that world, that business is going to suffer. Right. So indefinitely, that 5,000 stadium event, concert, et cetera, like there's a whole industry around having, you know, thousands of people together like CES, E3, right, like all these, that business until you have these cures or really effective treatments just can't return to normal. So that's going to be years and years and years and years. And then you've got other things that maybe can adapt, right?

You know, Uber Eats is going to be more of the Uber business instead of. So, you know, other things like that, I just don't know. It's hard to forecast how healthy things play out. But I don't know. If there's more unemployment. If you are directly affected, it's going to be a long time. The more unemployment means it'll be easier to hire people, certainly. salaries will probably be less extreme competition for talent will be different.

Real estate and people paying for extreme, big companies buying big commercial real estate to put people packed in in open floor plans. Like that seems to me to be the big, that's going to be a sea change. I think work from home now. Yeah. Like I refuse to do remote podcasts because I feel like I can't. do what we're doing right now as well without having the person across from me. And I've had to adjust my game a little bit. I hopefully these interviews are as good in person. I'm not certain they are,

but I'm not certain they're not. I mean, certainly it provides value, but if we were in the room together, I think I might get you to give me even more candid answers. I might get you to give it up even better, but it's, it's really interesting to what will happen to office space and working from home. The idea that we have Google workers and Apple workers on buses for 75 minutes to go down to the peninsula from $4,000 apartments in San Francisco, I think that whole model collapses. That I think will change dramatically for sure. Yeah, the, look, there is, there's, there is no substitute, I think, when you think of, there's communication, which is spoken or written, but in person communication, all the nonverbal's eye contact. I mean, there's

something about empathy, trust, you know, all of those. these deep psychological things that are really hard to replicate digitally. I mean, there will be progress in that regard for sure. I think there's going to be more attention to like this telepresence in other areas like that. How can it feel like you and I are face to face, even though when we're not physically together? Like, there's no question that will be areas of future, you know, startup opportunities because it becomes more and more important. But it's sad. I mean, that's the part that's probably, you know, saddest to me is there's a lot of our humanity that derives from being together and, you know, high-fiving and looking at people and really, you know,

listening closely and, you know, some amounts of physical contact, appropriate of course and things like that that just make you feel like, hey, I'm not alone. And I've certainly struggled with this a bit in this environment. Like, I've got a lovely family, but imagine, you know, if you're alone trying to just deal with these ups and downs and you don't have anybody to just, you know, sit across from and give a hug too and stuff. It's super hard and sad. And I obviously am hopeful that we can come up with these treatments. I'm an optimist.

I think this is my, this is what I think's going to happen. I think so I think that if people wear masks and don't shake hands and social distance, we're going to be able to just have young people who are less impacted or people who don't have diabetes and are overweight, that seems to be something that's going to be a major contributing factor. Yeah. So people who are healthy, under 50, under 55, 60, whatever it is, with masks, not touching door handles, getting rid of door handles like they don't have them in Japan, getting rid of touching kiosk, all this kind of stuff, wearing masks to work.

I think we go back to work in May in California, maybe a third of the population goes back to work, two-thirds stay home, and we see if the curve increases. Because, man, in California, the ICUs are empty. in the Bay Area. I don't know if you follow this doctor from UCSF who posts like every day how many COVID patients they have and I didn't check today. But it's been 13 patients in UCSF and either seven or nine we're in ICU.

So it is bonkers how effective the Bay Area has been which I have to attribute to the fact that you've got a very science-based group of people here who understand because they're very involved in business and viral coefficients. And I'm not saying this to be

silly, but if you understand virality and whatever this, you know, R-0 or not, like how things grow, we all understand, like, we talked about Uber growing virally because somebody would take somebody in Uber and they'd say, how did you do that? And they'd show them over the shoulder virality. Like, here's the app. Look, watch. Yep, totally. All of that I think led to everybody here taking it seriously. And then people

in other states who maybe heard on Fox News, it was a hoax and were only 15 people with it on a cruise ship somewhere and it was going to zero, they just ignored it. And Florida two days ago? I mean, Florida two days ago did their statewide quarantine. This is in day, I'm day Thursday, I'm day 23 for me in quarantine. You're day 20 something, right? Yep, same.

We are 20 days into our quarantine when Florida just enacted it. Think about that. And New York was 10 days behind us, and they have the biggest outbreaks. So the biggest outbreaks seem to be in cities where you ignored it for some period of time and you have density. So maybe Florida is a little more spread out and they don't have mass transit. Maybe that solves it. But what happens to mass transit? I think we, I think it was, it was, yeah, three weeks ago now when Menlo went to work from home.

And I think it was like LinkedIn, Microsoft and some of Amazon were a week ahead of us. So if you say who are the first people that were announcing that and doing this, it was these, you know, big tech companies where I think you recognize, wow, I've got 10,000 employees and why risk it. Even, you know, one would be horrible. And like you said, kind of understanding of viral coefficients. And, you know, you didn't have to go too far to study what happened in Japan or Italy at the time if you were looking.

But a lot of people just weren't looking because, you know, it's just such a shocking shock to the system. It's easy to be in denial, I think. I think it's much more comforting to say, listen, yeah, it's going to be a bad flu season. It's going to be like the flu. It might turn out with social distancing. You know, I was having this discussion with people who really like to handicap things and predict. And there's like a book called Super Forecasting. If you haven't read, it's pretty good.

And they have all these good forecasters. And I think the forecast is most people believe, you know, who do this for a living, forecasting, 50 to 200, thousand dead in the United States because of the techniques we're doing, and we have 50,000 people die on average from the flu. So the, and we're only at 4,000 people dead in the U.S. now, or is it five here? So if we look at the deaths, and listen, one death is horrible. So, but you do have to think about the totality of this. The people with the best forecasting ability seem to think two-x flu season.

In other words, another flu season on top of the flu season. would be the low end of the estimate, maybe 50% more people than flu seasons, so 25,000 people on top of 50 and an average, and then maybe we wind up with five times flu season, so it would be like six flu seasons at once. You put all that together, it's horrible,

but I'm an optimist, it feels survivable, and the problem with this was we thought it was an 8% death rate, 5.6% death rate. I had people who were friends of mine freaking the frig out, getting guns, going to the woods and saying, we're going to lose 100 million, 200 million Americans get it, at 8%. That's 16 million dead. The 16 million dead estimate, it just seems for the United States is insane. Like that's just not even in the reality of possibility. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Well,

I think last last I saw on the actual death rates, because like you said, a lot of the people weren't, may have had it and weren't diagnosed. So the percentages were so high, but it was like, you know, 0.66%. You know, that's still a lot of people. And the 100,000 death projection, I believe, is based on social distancing. Yes, that is a social distancing. So the biggest question that, you know, you mentioned, and I think that that strategy feels like kind of the inevitable one is, you know, if you're at risk, you know, you may just have to quarantine indefinitely until this, you know, virus or effective treatments show up. But, you know, the rest of us, you know, start to try to, you know, return to some sense of normalcy with masks

with these precautions and then, you know, see how effective it is. I think that's kind of the big uncertainty still. And think about that. I mean, as a political hot potato, you know, we're people of science here in the valley in general and we kind of think about systems and, you know, deploying a product or a service into a system into a world. So we're really thinking about this in a very logical fashion. Now imagine you're a politician who's at an election in six months or 12 months or 18 months, your only, the only viable strategy is to say,

we got to keep everybody at home until there's a, until there is a solution here. They really, you score no points if, in their minds, if you send people back to work and people die, which people will. If you send people back to work, they're going to die. Well, that's an interesting question. I mean, I haven't thought,

I'm definitely no politician. I'm more of a scientist engineer myself, but the idea that, look, there's a lot of people now who are out of work who are young and not at risk, they are also voters, right? So if you feel like, geez, you know, I don't, my grandparents have already passed or whatever else, and I want to get back to work.

I mean, that's a vote that may not go in that direction. So I don't know. That's fascinating too. These are just really tricky. You know, literally what we're thinking about is what you think about when you launch a product in the world, which is how is it going to be received by people? And what is the constituents going to say?

Like, so if you have, if you raise prices on Uber Eats or you make Amazon Prime one day or two days or three days, whatever it is, you really like to think these things through. And politicians are, you know, they were caught so flat-footed overall. They were so flat-footed. And you can't test. I mean, that's the thing that we all know from seeing these companies in action, right? Like, okay, I'll try all three of these on different landing pages and then look at the numbers and the cohort behavior three months later and see. Politicians had to make, yeah, this decision sweep in a sweeping way, you know, overnight for everybody, right? So it's a much blunter instrument when you're dealing with policies and especially these like relief bills.

Somebody was like, hey, how would you answer this question? Because I was a big Bloomberg fan for president. And we were just talking about health care or whatever. And I said, you know, the way I would answer the health care question is, I'm not sure what's going to work in America. We can see what works in other countries in terms of how they design their health care system. So I think we'll have three states do some version of, you know, universal health care. We'll have those states vote if they want to do it. And the states that vote, they want to have a universal health care system and pay this amount of tax for it.

We'll let them vote and we'll let them execute it for five years. and we'll publish all the results and we'll have up to three people do it with the government match and we'll see it they'll take it out of their state taxes everybody pays another whatever $700 or $1,500 a year in tax

they raise their taxes and they do it and the government supports it and we'll have this nationwide conversation no politician gets seems to want to say I don't know what's going to work in America but let's run some tests.

It would be very interesting if somebody had really tried that and brace it because that's the right answer right. It's literally the right You can't anticipate all of the complexities of a system of this order magically like human behavior, so you have to test it. I would test this one, which is what I'd say is in San Francisco, in the Bay Area, we're going to run a test. And we're going to ask people under the age of 40 for companies that want to opt into this, and we want them to report people going to work who are age 40.

And we want them all to agree, as part of going to work, they're going to take their temperature every day. you're going to submit your temperature through this app and you're all going to go for weekly testing and we're going to try to get 100,000 people in the test or so and we're going to publish the results and see if anybody gets in. They're going to tell us how they got to work

and their commute. Do they take Bart? Did they take the bus? Did they walk? They bike? Did they take an Uber or a lift? And let's go from there. That would be an amazing...

The beauty of that is you don't actually have to ask anybody for anything. I mean, the technology is there. I'm wearing an aura ring. Oh, right. And my phone knows where I am. So I have like heartbeat data and temperature data and, you know, location data, essentially 24-7. You have temperature data from the ring? The ring, yeah. The ring gives you

temperature data? I didn't know that. They, ORA was at our launch festival, I don't know, six years ago, five years ago. And I was like, I just don't want to do any more hardware startups. It's just too brutal. And the guy was like, no, I think it's going to be like, this is going to cost nothing eventually. And it's really the software. And I was like, I just can't take out any more hardware risk at this point. It's too hard. expensive. Expensive experiments. Very expensive. Hey, if you could, if I could ask one question of you, go ahead. You know, one thing that, that I think our firm has always aspired to do and is never properly executed is, you know, we do a lot of this high quality thesis work internally and it stays

internal. Yeah. And just, you know, they've seen you in action with Angel and otherwise and just, you know, how, you know, how much high quality content you're able to put into the world in short about time. I would love to learn more about how you guys do it. Well, you know, blogging was a big revolution, right? And then you had this revolution of podcasting. So I started blogging 2003. I started podcasting 12 years ago. We had Calacanuscast and then the first episode of This Week in startups,

maybe 11 years ago. So when a new format comes out, you can really experiment and have an interesting time. And so that is a great entry point. Now, there are still tried and true, but right now there's probably 50 podcasts. by venture capitalists conservatively. And so, you know, it's a little noisy there.

Probably not a great time to start. Blogs also probably not a great time to start. But here's something that's new. Webinars, right? Like what we're doing right now, zooms. So here's what I would say. If I was you, I would do a free Zoom. And I would say, I'm going to just talk about these three matrices.

And we're going to do it as a free Zoom. And you can join the Zoom. you just register here at this type form or survey monkey, go ahead and register, Google form, whatever. And I'm going to let 200 people on. And I'm just going to explain to you in my own words, because you're a plain spoken, really smart dude. It's like you don't really need to be coached. When you're talking about that which you're an expert, there is no coaching necessary. The reason people have to practice and have to go to training and do all the stuff is because

they're trying to talk about shit they don't know. But you know it cold because you created these things. So what I would do is I'd say, hey, listen, we have 10. different criteria we look at, and I'm just going to unveil three of, three or four of them in three podcast series, or I'm sorry, three webinars, and just do three webinars and see what happens. It's lightweight. It's an experiment. You got time.

You're sitting at home. I sent you the microphone on the headset. And just do what you're doing here and explain three concepts in an hour and then take questions. And what you'll see is, you know, now you got 200 emails. Poor webinar. Now you get 600 emails. When you do the fourth or fifth one, you're going to start with 600 emails and say, hey, I'm doing a new one. and keep it short.

Short is better than nothing. So people get too precious. I've never been precious about the things I do. I'm just like, you know, I'm going to pop it up and do it, right? And here we go.

And that was the start of this podcast was just, you know, we had one camera. If you look at the first episodes, we had one or two cameras, I think, maybe even one for some of the first ones where I just put,

I just turn the camera on and put a microphone literally on the desk in between the two people with no microphones when we did Calicanuscast. So don't be precious and just try some.

thing and then see. But I think talking about that which we know really well is the way to do it. That's my best advice. And the problem is, I like that. I think for people who are very consider and smart, they always think there's somebody who is a smart person who is very considered will say there's somebody who knows more than me. I don't need to be the one doing this.

And then somebody who's a neophyte like me says, well, why not me? Right. and I'll give it a shot. And so what I find sometimes is my smartest friends don't do it because they're like, there's got to be somebody better. Like imagine a Bill Gurley podcast. You know, like you and I would be like, when is the next? We'd be sitting there like, we'd be online 15 minutes before the podcast and we'd pay $100 per issue.

We pay a hundred, what would you pay per episode for the Bill Gurley or Michael Moritz podcast or Doug Leone podcast? We'd pay $100 an episode. Yeah, gold. we would literally be waiting like we would be like you know the people who show up half an hour before the Warriors game to watch the shoot around we'd be like yeah we want just in case he goes on microphone early I want to be here for it I want to just soak it in so don't be too precious about it and look at it as instead of you looking at it as like I'm producing a book or a podcast look at us you're having a you're hosting a conversation how many minutes you mentioned it has to be short short is better than nothing that's what I tell people who are founders who are sending us monthly updates short is better than nothing short is better than nothing. Short is better than nothing. thing. And so I'm literally tell my founders, send me back these five numbers, you know, number of customers this month, number of customers, send me these five cohorts. Number of customers this month versus last month, revenue this month for last month, spend this month versus last month,

headcount this month, headcount this month versus last month, maybe traffic this month. You know, there might be some other metric. And just sending me those five metrics and don't write any copy. And that I'll hit reply. And, you know, like, they're like, I don't have time to write an update. It took me five hours to write the last one. I'm like, too precious. Give me these five numbers and I'll hit reply and we'll have a conversation. And it frees them, right? They're like, I can get those five numbers. I have them right here. I'm like, great, email those.

Cash in bank. How about that? So webinar, webinar idea length. Is it 20 minutes? 15? 10? I think 20 minutes to 20 minutes 10 to 20 minutes for you to present and then take questions for as long as they're interesting. And always leave people wanting more.

Interesting. Yeah. All right, good. Thank you. All right, there you go, Sean. You got your marching orders and thanks for coming on the pod. I know everybody's very busy, very stressed out right now. And, you know, one of the ways you can deal with that low-lying dread, that existential concern you have, I think, is to do work, is to feel of service and have purpose. And, you know, that's what we're doing here on this podcast. You and I talking and giving this advice and sharing what we've learned for that next generation of investors and or founders who maybe get something from

this. I just encourage everybody out there listening, do the work. And if you do the work, and you're busy and you get a little exercise, you go for that hike, you get that sunlight, eat healthy, spend time with your family, enjoy that. But work, do some work. You'll feel better. Yeah. Move the ball forward.

I might add to serve as well. Yes. Be of service. My wife, Jennifer, who is also a venture capitalist, founder of Reach Capital, got a nice family system going where, you know, there's a list of, you know, little service things, talk about writing, you know, getting started small, just calling a grandparent dropping off something for the neighbors, you know, preparing a care

package for somebody who, you know, is alone or, you know, somebody in the family who's in the healthcare industry. So I think, you know, doing our best to try and, you know, help out in small, what feels like small ways relative to being on the front lines, but, you know, some way to be appreciated. Small is big. Small is the new big. Give tips. That's my other thing. Like, listen, if you got people dropping food off and the service doesn't allow you put tipping, just get that $10, $5, $20 bill. and just tape it to your front door or put it in an envelope and just put Uber driver, Uber Eats driver, or Instacard, man, and sometimes they say they're not allowed to give a tip and say, you know what,

just buy everybody lunch at the office. And I'm not taking it back. If you, you could drop it on the floor and somebody else can pick it up or you can take it back to the office. That's what I tell people when they say, we don't take tips. I just throw it right in their hand. And I say, great. You know, you can throw it on the ground. Somebody else can pick it up, but I'm not taking it back.

I like that. That's my style from Brooklyn. Everybody gets a tip. Give tips, everybody. Big, huge tips to your front line workers. Huge tips. If you are listening to this podcast and you've got a job, you can afford if you're getting a $25 hamburger to give a $5.10 or even $25.

Be 100% tipper if you can. Okay? All right, Sean, thanks for doing it. Everybody follow Sean VC on the Twitter. I don't know if he tweets, but you follow them. All right. Look forward to your webinar. Stay safe, everybody.

We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.