This Week in Startups - Elon no longer joining $TWTR board, Breslow's Instacart case-study, NYT tells reporters to reduce time on Twitter | E1432

Episode Date: April 12, 2022

All news show. First, we discuss Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announcing that Elon has reversed his decision to join Twitter's board (04:10) and the NYT's Editor telling reporters to stop tweeting so much in an internal memo (31:29). Then, we discuss Ryan Breslow's latest series of threads, including one claiming that Instacart’s CEO was shadow-fired by Sequoia (44:35).  (00:00) Jason on meeting Harrison Ford (01:42) Jason and Molly catching up (04:10) Elon reverses decision to join Twitter board, according to CEO Parag Agrawal (12:09) Microsoft for Startups Hub - Apply in 5 minutes, no funding required, sign up at http://aka.ms/thisweekinstartups (13:44) Molly’s take on Elon’s deleted tweets and board seat story (20:30) Assure - To get 20% off your first Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) visit https://Assure.co/twist (22:04) Is Twitter dying and why? (30:08) Microacquire - Sell your business with no fees at https://try.microacquire.com/twist (31:29) NYT told its reporters to stop tweeting so much in an internal memo from executive editor Dean (44:35) Ryan Breslow posted another series of threads over the weekend, including one claiming that Instacart’s CEO was shadow-fired by Sequoia FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Harrison Ford happened to be there. Somebody introduced me to him, and I talked to him for 20 minutes about Blade Runner, which was the highlight of my evening slash life. And I was like, so with the voiceover, did you phone it in? Because people speculate this. Son, I think you know more about this film than I do. This week in Startups is brought to you by Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub. For the challenges you face as a startup founder,

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Twist listeners can get 20% off their first SPV at assure.co slash twist. That's assure. That's assure.co slash twist and microacquire, the startup acquisition marketplace. Start the right acquisition conversations at your own pace. Get free and instant access to over 100,000 trusted buyers with total anonymity. Say goodbye to brokers and meet your ideal buyer today. Go to try.microacuire.com slash twist. Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of this week in startups back from her triumphant vacation.

She took some time off. She went to incredible locations. like the dying, decrepit, poisoned, Salton Sea, an incredible world tour. She's back, the Oracle of Oakland. Our Dame from the podcasting Hall of Fame, yes, the Queen of Green, Molly Wood. Welcome back to the program. My God, I get my very own all-in-style hype intro? Absolutely.

Hype intros are coming for everybody. You have made the year? That's outstanding. That's why I was smiling because I knew you'd get a kick out of it because I was like, You know what, Molly deserves one. I'm going to workshop one. So thanks to Nick for workshopping with me. Damn.

I'm particularly proud of the dame from the podcasting Hall of Fame. The podcasting Hall of Fame is, but I'm like, I'm blushing a little bit. Like, that was huge for me. It was huge, man. I just, if everybody could help me, though, I just, I've done three weeks of these fucking intros at all in. I know. Like, how long can you keep that up?

Because that's amazing. I can't keep it up. There's no way I can keep it up. But if people can give me DMs open, send me one liners. Basically, here's how you make the intro. you find something in the orbit of somebody, you know, like if I'm breaking chops with sacks that he's into Tucker, you know, they just got to get a word or two that rhymes with Tucker, and then you start workshopping it in your brain.

Mm-hmm. Like he's a sucker for Tucker, you know? Yeah, no, I get it. I got it. I went to a different word, obviously. He's friends with that effort. That's good. I might use that one again.

actually Nick you got that E already on the all-in podcast you might as well just go for it we do have an explicit there I uh oh j-cal got bars look at them go people are losing their minds in the comments about this and I'm just like they can't keep it up um it's literally but I give Nick a lot of credit producer Nick came up with sassel for sacks you did yeah that I think that was all Nick and I work I don't know because I asked the producers to put a couple notes in for me and you know I'll be honest like you know with comedy and most of them fall flat, but that one, that was the,

that was the, split the arrow with that one. All right, we got a lot of news today. So I, I guess, oh, okay,

let's just acknowledge up front. Yes, please. This is awkward for Jason. And I am not going to push you. Yeah, well, I mean,

your instinct. I handled you a little bit the last time we talked about this. And I won't because I know it's a tough spot to be a complicated. You know, like if you're best friends, I have like three or four best friends who are in the news a lot.

And it just makes it hard for me to comment on stuff, especially, and we can leave this in the show. I give the disclaimer all the time, you know, like if Travis or Elon or, you know, whoever are in the news, sometimes I can or can't comment on it because I'm friends with them. And then what happens is I become this backdoor proxy. So like last week, I got asked to be on 20 different news programs, not to talk about the work I'm doing in the world. Yeah. But to talk about, you know, whatever Elon's doing. And that's fine. I understand.

And I will go to bat. You know, my general philosophy is if, like, they're getting beat up in the press about something, like in the old days, I would go to bat for them. Because there was nobody else and people didn't even know the company. So when you see old clips of me defending Tesla, like, hey, we should have green cars or defending Uber. Hey, Travis is going to figure it out. It's kind of a different moment than now when people have arrived. And so let's get right into it. Obviously, people know that Elon.

has a position in Twitter and was going to join the board and Parag Argrwal. Agrawal. Hargawal. I got it right. Okay, thank God. I mean, it's so weird of my dyslexia.

Sometimes I just nail the hard ones and then I get like Jones wrong. That's a hard one too, though. I'm like a rural juror. Like it's hard, it's hard to put all those. Yeah. Anyway. Parag Argoal.

Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty, it's actually pretty easy for me. Yep. Okay. So Parag tweeted out this. memo that he sent to the entire Twitter team saying that Elon Musk would not, in fact, be taking a board seat. So to get you all caught up, and I'm sure you have been, because you're all in our industry and I've been paying attention to this nonstop, which even I was while I was

by the pool, um, pretty compelling. Elon Musk has taken this stake in Twitter, 9.2%. It sounded like he was going to join the board of Twitter. And then over the weekend, Parag sent this note saying Elon Musk has decided not to join our board. I'm just going to read some or all of this and then we'll discuss. Here's what I can share about what happened. Parag wrote. The board and I had many discussions about Elon joining the board and with Elon directly. We were excited to collaborate and clear about the risks.

We also believed that having Elon is a fiduciary of the company where he, like all board members, has to act in the best interest of the company and all our shareholders, was the best path forward. The board offered him a seat. We announced on Tuesday that Elon would be appointed to the board contingent on a background check and formal acceptance. Elon's appointment to the board was to become officially effective for nine. That was a Friday, I think. But Elon shared that same morning that he will no longer be joining the board. I believe this is for the best. We have an always will value

input from our shareholders, whether they're on our board or not. Elon is our biggest shareholder. We'll remain open to his input. There will be distractions ahead, but our goals and priorities remain unchanged. The decisions we make and how to execute is in our hands, no one else's. let's tune out the noise and stay focused on the work and what we're building. Yeah. So, you know, there's been a lot of speculation as to why this is, I don't have inside information. So just to make that clear for the reaggregators, please don't react. It's a thing I say.

So awkward. Well, no, adding to it is, I went to the Gigafactory opening because all my friends were there. And then somebody took video of me talking to Harrison Ford in the VIP. Harrison Ford happened to be there. Somebody introduced me to him, and I talked to him for 20 minutes about Blade Runner, which was the highlight of my evening slash life. And I was like, so with the voiceover,

did you phone it in? Because people speculate this. Son, I think you know more about this film than I do. And I was like, well, dude, you should watch my show. Because I was like, well, tell me about really Scott or whatever. And I opened up by saying this. I just want to thank you for my childhood. Like Mosquito Coast, Indiana Jones, Blade Runner, Star Wars.

I said, you know, it's just, it's just amazing and just thrilling to meet you. And I just want to say thank you because, like, a lot of the highlights of my childhood were, you know, around the performance you gave. It's really true. Now you make me feel old J-Gal. I'm at working at a workshop in my Harrison Ford. You know, son, son, I think you know more of this film than I do. It was amazing. I asked him like, did you know you were a replicant?

I was like, did you know you were a replicant? And he says to me, You know, I told really Scott, don't fucking tell me. I don't want to know. That's for you to decide. I want to do a detective movie. And I read the script and they have voiceover in the script. And I want to show it through actions.

And they want me to do a voiceover. I was in it for a detective movie. It was the greatest conversation. Yeah. And I'm talking to him with me, Walter Isaacson, Harrison Ford, are talking. Yeah. You know, and now it's getting on 10 minutes, 15. And there is like a group of people trying to get to either of those to interest and in all

honesty. A couple of people want to take a couple of stuff as we may. But, you know, Harrison Ford is the show. And so, you know, he doesn't want to stop talking to us because we're having like a great conversation about really Scott, about film, about Tesla, about car. I mean, just everything. It is a great moment. So here's what I think.

There is no greater product person or executive. And it's kind of obvious just in terms of like experience and success than Elon at 12. at Twitter. And on a product basis, he uses Twitter more effectively than anyone at Twitter and probably knows the product as good or better. And so he,

as a way that he operates businesses, talks about them. He does customer support in real time. So whether you like his style or not, if you just look at it on a customer support in a product basis, let's just narrow on those two things, which is a big part of running a successful company,

is listening to your customers. and building great products. He's better than anybody there, hands down. I mean, the guys, while this was all going down, the Gigafactory is the largest footprint building in the world. I believe in the United States for sure. I mean, this thing, Molly, when you look at it, like, it took me 15, 20 minutes to walk to like that, you know,

top level VIP area to like watch the presentations and everything. I mean, it's like a long, long, long building. It is crazy. And then he also was taking people to the international. Space Station on a tourist thing. This is all in the same 48-hour period. So if you're on the board of a company like this, you can't talk about the product anymore. That's over. And so I don't know why he made the decision. I don't know, Prague's decisions. I don't know the board's decision. I have no insight into anything. But for me, I'd rather see Elon talking about the product all day long.

And there was a very vibrant discussion about the product this weekend, including Twitter blue, which I have. And which is kind of not worth paying for. but I have talked for many years. In fact, since 2007, 2008, I've been talking about, hey, the blue check mark should be something that anybody can pay for. And then people are like, well, then how would that affect journalists like us who have the blue check mark and we feel special about it or celebrities? And we all know the history of the blue check mark.

The blue check mark came because a lot of us had people faking and they just wanted to make sure you knew who was the real Esther Coucher. In fact, I think he was patient zero on the blue check mark. I'm actually sure of that, right? I remember having conversations with Ev about it. And so I think those kind of discussions are where Ilan can be most helpful. And the amount of attention that Twitter is getting now is huge. And I guess there's speculation that if he was on the board, he could only build a certain size position.

And so, again, I don't know anything. Sincerely, do not know anything. Don't reaggregate me. But maybe he wants to own more. Or, you know, maybe he wants to talk about it. And so that's probably better for everybody. by some estimates over 90% of startups will go out of business in year one. I know it as an angel investor.

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I don't know what your take on it is. There were, right. So there was this, there were, I mean, there is obviously a lot of speculation about this. Nonstop.

There were tweets that were deleted over the weekend, which was interesting, right? There were a lot of tweets that Elon made over the weekend

that were somewhat critical of, Twitter. Like, nobody's at the headquarters, so we should turn it. There was a, as usual, yay, a boob joke. Listen, I have this sense of humor of a 14-year-old boy myself, but like. Yeah, I mean, you were doing the BDE jokes just two weeks ago in the program. So you guys might not be that different.

Probably. It's very possible that, like, in private, we would have the same, but I don't make those jokes on Twitter. I only make them. You did make it on the pod, though. Just on the podcast. Anyway, so there were a lot of tweets that were deleted. Then there was like, you know, then there's the Kremlinology of like, well, he liked this one tweet where somebody said that he was told to be quiet and play nice and he liked that.

And then, of course, there was a speculation they may have decided not to take a board seat because he may want to own more than, what is it, 14.9%. I think is the max you can own as a director. And so there were. I don't even know where that comes from, that concept. And so I, that felt to me, I don't know, but I would like to get fact check on this, that that was just some agreement they came to, that they picked some number that he could own as a board director. Yeah. But obviously it's, oh, do you think it's exclusive to him? Well, it could be one of two things.

It could have been something they negotiated with him. It could be something that's in the charter of the company that, you know, independent board directors or board directors will only own up to this amount without consulting with the board. You know, it could be like a, not a poison pill, but like a little bit of a circuit. breaker, if you're going to accumulate more, just let us know kind of situation or get approval. So I don't think anybody knows exactly where that comes from, but it would be good to get some clarity on that, obviously. But one of the things that's interesting about Twitter, and this goes to governance, which we talk about on this program all the time, because we're early stage investors, is unlike

the New York Times or Facebook, which have very strong owner control. Like, the New York Times is basically a private company that acts as a public company with Solzberger. Solzburger. Is my dislike, my dislike, that's hard one. Solzburgers,

control that company and then like some Mexican billionaire bought, I forgot his name, Carlos. You got to come to us. Anyway, he bought a ton of it,

but he has no say. Right. So it's like a faux public company and then you look at Facebook, that's kind of another faux public company where like Zuckerberg's kids, grandkids, great grandkids, like 17 generations for now

will still control the company. company, it's, it's kind of weird that you get to be public and then also get to be controlled like a private company. I always felt that was weird. Like, I don't know if we should allow that, you know, or maybe it's, no, we definitely should not. There should be like, anyway. Anyway, I mean, it's sort of like a hybrid. Twitter is not like that. Twitter is not like that. So here's the now when it comes to the point. It's just like, it's like the United States of America. There's 300 million plus people and 270 million were adults who theoretically 20070 million votes. Twitter has some number of votes.

And so for people who are complaining on the left or the far left or whoever, like start a group and buy a billion. It's not that hard for, you know, people who have track records to pull together a billion or two billion dollars has a consortium and buy a piece of this, right? There's plenty of people who are capable of doing that who maybe, you know, are on different parts of the political spectrum, right? George Soros and other people buy shit all the time like this.

So that's one of the interesting things I find about Twitter is, It's one of the only public platforms that you could actually vote with your dollar on. I have so many thoughts about this idea that it's relatively easy for somebody to put together a consortium of a couple billion dollars to invest in Twitter, which is like only barely makes money. Like, I don't know about that, right? There are not that. The New York Times could put together a billion dollars tomorrow.

They could just go to their bankers and put together a billion and buy some of it. They could buy three or four percent of it. There is a version in which there could be a bidding war for Twitter shares, and that would be pretty interesting, right? Like, it would be interesting if somebody was like, I'm concerned about this existential threat that, you know, Elon Musk's ownership in Twitter represents for the public square. And so I'm going to, like, buy an equal and opposite number of shares,

either via a Dow or with, or with another billionaires of the home. I don't know. I'm not saying, like, the, you know, right, okay. A civilian can do it. I'm talking about people of means. there are tons of them across the spectrum and they could buy different and they have right so people with

different I mean and corporations with different political innings could buy portions of it and I think actually that's a potential outcome here. I mean that would be super interesting because it because it look we have no idea I this is what part of what makes this so awkward is because

there's only one person in there like there's a handful of people in the world who might be able to understand what Elon is thinking about this and weirdly you're one of them and like you're really good at But so no one knows. Let's just keep a simple as a... I think you can take Elon. I think you can take Elon as a word.

Elon, you probably take Elon on his word. He thinks it's important. He said it's a public square. He said freedom of speech is important. I think you take him out his word. And he thinks the product is broken, right? Well, we all think the product could be better. He asked at one point, I think, if Twitter was dying,

since many of the most followed accounts tweet very little. I thought that was a good tweet, actually. And I responded to it. Like, they really have not thought about Justin Bieber at all, right? They haven't thought about Katie Perry and those. kind of people. I think he'd name check both of them. And, you know, if you look at those two. Anyway, look at TikTok.

I responded with a TikTok screenshot. And I was like, look, TikTok puts Bieber's tracks right on his profile. If Twitter was like run properly over the years and it has not been run properly ever. I mean, that's why. Completely agree. Yeah. I mean, that's why Zuckerberg called it the clown car that drove into a diamond mind. Like put merch on your profile.

page, put tracks on your profile page, and let people sell their tickets, and all of a sudden, those people would be super engaged again. They could make that in a team of five developers and five product managers, just a SWAT team of 10, literally a million dollar team. That two million dollar team, they'd get paid well there. Two million dollar team could build this in six months and then iterate on it every three months, and they could be the best platform for musicians. But the team of 10 people in $2 million a year, and that would generate, you know,

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their cap tables nice and clean. No messy party rounds over here, no, they also manage the entire process over the life of the investment. So to get 20% off your first special purpose vehicle, SPV, I want you to visit ashore.com slash twist. That's A, A, S-S-S-U-R-E-D-C-O-S-T-W-I-T. You get 20% off your first S-E-V. I mean, it is interesting. Like, I think it's worth looking at why Twitter might be dying. Like, I still use Twitter a fair amount, but my usage has certainly declined.

And because, so I was listening. Harassment or, because it's not fun, right? So I was listening to the All-In podcast and obviously like a whole. lot of the conversations around this involve this concept of free speech. And you know, I always roll my eyes when people call it that because censorship is a tool of government, not private companies.

But also, I was thinking about why I have this reflexive response and many people I know have this reflexive response. And it's because for women and women of color and people from marginalized groups, the speech on Twitter has never been free. Right? It has always come

at a high cost. You get brigaded. You get yelled. Like I have long since censored myself on Twitter because it sucks to be on Twitter. If you got more than, you know, 20,000 followers and you're a lady. And so this idea that like the rich white guys who are left just discovered that sometimes it's not that fun to be on Twitter and they want more free speech. And a lot of the speech they seem to be advocating for as disinformation or harassment. it's like,

well, no, I don't think anybody's In fairness, I don't think anybody is advocating for that. I think it's more like, I think COVID-19 was a big trigger for folks and like the blocking of the New York Post. I know for Sacks, like that was a big one.

But, you know, when you give them the examples of, and I think Trump was a big one for some people. And I think, you know, the Trump one, I had, I did not want to see Trump get banned as president because I thought it was important

that the president be on there, but when he gave them the easy, like, I'm causing a riot and people are going to die. I wouldn't have done a lifetime ban. I would have done doubling bans every time he does something. So it was a one-year ban. And then he does it again.

Now it's a three-year ban. You know, kind of like how the justice system works. So anyway, that's just like a nuance. But I understand your point. Like, it's a different experience. But, you know, they added that feature where you can have only your people can reply. So you use that feature? I'm curious.

I started using it. I don't think I use the version where only people who follow. me can reply. I mean, my Twitter, look, I am very lucky also. My Twitter's not that bad. It's really not. And I don't know if it's, you know,

I don't think it's mean. It's probably because I have spent a long time censoring myself and being a lot nicer on Twitter. And also I'm a very aggressive blocker. Not Andreson level blocker, but, you know, like I'm like to do. On a scale of one to Mark Andreessen, you're like a sudden.

Is optional for me. Like, I don't have to listen to this and I block. But anyway, I guess all I'm saying is like, Twitter probably is dying because as a product, there's very little upside. Like, you can get attention, you can build a brand, but it's mostly sort of like journalists and people who like to fight with each other, which actually leads quite nicely into our next story.

Because what it really comes down to is like, what is Twitter for, who is Twitter for, and what would make it work best? It's a full contact platform, right? I mean, just the nature of how it's designed that anybody on the platform can respond to anybody is like hugely, and this was Ev's and Jack's original vision that it was the most open platform. So if you were a celebrity, if you were a politician, you couldn't control your own replies. So you choose this. You got to answer to everybody. It's like you can't just like speak to your constituents, although they did add that feature, which I just talked about, like only allow

my followers or people I follow to comment. So they did eventually add that. But that was the antithesis of what Jack and Ev and Biz wanted in the beginning. They were very clear. You want to to be on this platform, you got to answer to everybody. We're celebrities, politicians, journalists, sports figures. This is the open platform. You don't get to delete when people reply to you. You could report, but they did actually let you hide replies now. So they actually did wind up adding those features.

I just don't think people use them liberally. But anyway, I think this, yeah. I agree. I think people don't use them liberally. You know, I, like we talk all the time about the evolution of these platforms in a way that sort of follows what society does. Like, there's just only so much that you can say whatever you want to people or create bots to brigade them or, you know, pass around information that causes real world harm.

Right? Like, the real world harm thing is real. I think this is like one of your good insights here is like if, and I think actually, Elon's talked about this a lot about like all the crypto people, crypto scams and all the fake accounts that put like a, a blue, you know, whatever icon next. their names and try to get people to send ether or whatever. And YouTube has that problem too. All these fake accounts.

Like there's like a, there was a 24 hour Tramoth channel for a while trying to get people to send Bitcoin to a wallet that was supposedly Tramots. Yeah. All that bot problem could be easily solved. And I think Twitter is like technically incompetent and just doesn't solve that problem. Here's an idea. Like if you were paying for the service as if you paid for the VIP level of a service,

like I have 500,000, you have 200,000, he's got 70 million. for people with over 100,000, you pay $1,000 a year for like VIP service. For people over a million you pay $5,000 a year, whatever it is. Like some, if you choose, that could get you VIP customer support where you can literally call somebody on the phone and say, listen, look at my replies where you can email somebody, hey, can you look at my replies as somebody's pretending to me and they're like, okay, yeah, we'll delete that account right now. Thank you.

Thanks for calling Molly. Or you say, hey, listen, I'm being harassed. You email your customer support rep. Hey, listen, there's somebody who's been harassing me feels like this is a bot army. and then like, yeah, okay, we're going to neuter that bot army. Like, how amazing would that be if they turned the biggest problem into a profit center? You know, like, it would actually be kind of cool. To be fair, although that is a lovely product idea that I would happily pay for,

that would take it even farther away from the idea of the public square. It would just be... The town square. If indeed we buy the idea that that's what Twitter is, which is some sort of a town square where, like, ideas are exchanged and it should be as free as possible and everybody's an equal because you can't pay, you can't buy your way out of the misery. No, no, you could pay. You could pay. It would just be a sliding scale. So if you have 10,000 people. That's not the town square. Yeah, but this isn't a, this is like if you go to the town square and

you want to, you know, order a glass of champagne from the restaurant that's on the town square. You could sit. We don't like the town square. We want to create. But that's what I'm saying. That's society. What you're describing is society. Yes. Right. A big messy town square where everybody's equal and accountable to all the same people and nobody can buy their way out of that experience. That's not what society wants. No. No, people do not want a way to line.

They want to have a VIP line at the DMV. Absolutely. Everybody eventually wants a VIP line. So if Twitter is going to become a better product, it's going to become less of a town square. Yeah. I mean, it will have town square like, you know, features. But I thought this New York Times, which is a great segue, why don't we segue into that? for a moment.

Because this is also super telling. So so many people on Twitter are journalists that it's funny actually because like seven or eight years ago maybe I ran out of time to do it. But I was like, I am going to get Marty Barron and Dean McKay and whoever was in at the Washington or was at the journal. Marty Barron was the post. Gerard Baker. Baker.

Baker. And I was going to be like, you need to come to my panel at South Best. Southwest and you need to explain to me why you're allowing your journalists on Twitter because Twitter has become the assignment desk for the mainstream media and that is terrible. Yeah. And now, here comes Dean Beké, who just woke up out of his, you know, decade long coma and was like, whoa, this is kind of a mess. Microacquire is a startup acquisition marketplace that cuts out everyone in the middle. Basically, this means they help a startup get acquired super efficiently. Yes, if your founder,

looking to sell, Microacquire is free, it's private, and nobody is going to get into the middle of your deal and insert their motivations, which might not be in your best interest to date, while they've helped hundreds of startups get acquired, I kid you not, and they've facilitated hundreds of millions of dollars in closed deal volume. Their platform includes over 120,000 buyers that pay $390 a year for a subscription, and thousands of startups currently are listed for sale at Microacquire. They've had hundreds of successful acquisitions so far. So founders can get free access instantly to over 120,000 trusted buyers, and you're going to stay totally anonymous. On the other side of the marketplace, again, buyers are paying that $390 a year so you know they're

serious. Microacquire will help you find a buyer for your startup. It's as simple as that. Buyers can browse listings for free, and the platform is totally free for sellers. Sign up for a premium subscription right now for just $390 a year to access. all these great deals at try. dot microacquire.com slash twist. Once again, t-R-Y dot micro-M-I-C-R-O-Aquire.com slash twist. The New York Times has told its reporters to stop tweeting so much.

After, by the way, really creating an environment in which if you were not on Twitter, you could not get hired as a new journalist. Like, no way. They were hiring people based on follower account. They were hiring people based on follower account without question because they're star makers and they want people to come in with a brand. They want traffic. It's a traffic based.

Or I should say it was a traffic based business. That may actually be the nuance here. So now reporters can still be on Twitter, but are encouraged to quote, meaningfully reduce how much time you're spending on the platform, tweeting or scrolling in relation to other parts of your job, according to Dean McKay. Dean McKay. So tweet less, tweet more thoughtfully, and devote more time to reporting.

I'm sorry, reporting. Can you define that? What is that exactly? That means retweets? Are retweets reporting or like it? Building a list? Is that reporting? Call people who are not on Twitter and find out what the actual story is.

What about the trending topics? That's reporting. If you go to trending topics and you pick the number 6, 7, 8, 1 that appeals to your sensibility and you write a story based on that. That's the real world. I mean, this goes back to the Chappelle quote. Twitter's not the real world. That's your point as well.

isn't it? Yeah, Twitter is not the real world. The push to have reporters tweet less. And again, we're sort of reporting this somewhat credulously as though the New York Times itself had not just gotten caught up in a scandal in which a departing reporter accused it of trying to stifle individual brands and creativity. And then Taylor Lorenz. Taylor Lorenz. And then Maggie Haberman, who nobody really realizes this. She's legacy at the New York Times. Like her father, was a legendary New York Times reporter, one of the people who helped build the place, right? So she is a grandfathered-in access reporter

who will never not be a star. To find access reporter for people who don't understand access journalism. So access journalism is the idea that you, the stories that you break, you are able to break a lot of news because you've cultivated a whole series of sources

who will tell you stuff. You have access to them. As a result, you don't burn that access. So what's prentious about that is? What's pernicious about that is you never know if there's information that is being held back in the interest of preserving access. And most likely there is. So the. And actually a classic example of this is when the books come out and the books contain information that was arguably in the public interest and could have been reported much sooner, but it was saved for the book because they had all this great access.

and they didn't want to, like, blow it up. Got it. And so if you were to write the truth, hey, or the full truth, let's say they put 87% out, that last 13%, if that were to make the subject perturbed, then you don't get them for the next story, which means you don't get the $500,000, a million dollar paycheck or whatever these access journalists are getting. Maybe you don't get the million dollar podcast deal. Maybe you don't have the million dollar conference deal.

Maybe the, you know, $3 million book deal. All that stuff goes. away if you don't have access to the subjects. Exactly. When in fact, a lot of times the subject's making the news, sure, a lot of them are politicians and a lot of them are people in the White House, but a lot of them are just people out in the world. There are great stories that you can tell without relying on leaks.

Because the access, the other downside of access journalism is you are most likely constantly being spun. Yes, you're being worked. I actually had a rule on Marketplace Tech, which is that we very rare. interviewed companies. Like, I hardly ever had CEOs on. We almost never talked to companies. We would talk to real people.

Like, we would talk to employees. We'd talk to employees or we would talk to customers. People actually, you know, on the receiving end of products, we talked to, to be fair, we talked to a fair number, like more than we should have of analysts and academics. But analysts and academics may be trying to sell a book, but the incentive are a little bit different from someone who's trying to build a company or spin a story politically, right, in the case of political access journalism. Which is why when you'll hear me on this podcast, if somebody starts doing that meeting,

trading, bull-shund I just tell them right up like, hey, yeah, no, I know you want to tell me the go-for-origin story. Just tell me the margins because that's all anybody gives a about. Like, let's be honest here, like, how the fuck are you making this business work? Yeah. Like, what is the goddamn margin? How does it work? Because everybody out here is, that's the question on everybody's mind.

Like, yeah, we love the fact that you can get us a pack of, you know, gum and the six pack of beer and whatever we're ordering in 25 minutes. But we just want to know if you're going to be here next year because everybody else who told us the same bullshit story is not here. Cosmo's not here. This isn't here. That's not here. Urban Fetch is in here.

I just love how like mad you are still about that. It's amazing. No, I just, I find, you know what it is. I just, I hate these media training people.

I hate your people with exception of like two who I'm friendly with. They just constantly are like, here's what you do. It's not real. They ask you a question, and then we have the stump speech for you. That makes you look really good. And if we keep telling it over and over again, here's the thing.

If you're media trained and you want to spin that book, just don't come on the show. Molly and I can talk about your business better with you not here if you're going to do the media training. If you come here, have a real goddamn conversation period, end of story. End of clip. Clip this. Send to the next PR person who tries to work us. I mean, that also, everything you said is also why I never chased CEO interviews.

because like, or very rarely. And every time I had one, it would be like a letdown. Because they're not, especially the bigger of the company, God help me. It's just boring. That's why you are a huge fan

of the CEOs talk candidly and real on Twitter. Oh, brahma, well played, sir. Well, play. So back to the New York Times. Back to the New York Times. We are taking at face value the idea that Vecay is worried

that journalists are spending too much time on Twitter, that their perceptions might be warped by what they see there, that they're no longer part of the real world, which again, a decade too late. And also, they just had this like absurd back and forth with Taylor Lorenz and other, you know, big-name journalists like essentially attacking her on Twitter.

It's, it is probably just as much reputational damage that Bekei is trying to control for here as it is time and a warped sense of reality. But the warped sense of reality on Twitter, I think, should be the basis of all of this. Like, it is not good journalism to be taking,

to be getting outraged by step you see on Twitter and then turning that into outrageous stories. This is, I think, key point. If your goal is to tell the truth to the audience, then it's not, you're not telling the truth if you're mitigating through the work lens of social media. That is not reality. How people behave on Twitter is crazy.

And, like, you know, the other thing that's dead, damaging to the New York Times brand. So there's one is, okay, the input, your view of the world and what you're going to write, the input is f*** up. Now, here's the other thing that gets totally screwed up is the perception of the paper over time. So Sarah, Zhang, yeah, J-E-O-N-G. Yeah.

I guess she's not part of the New York Times anymore. Remember when they brought her on, then somebody went through her tweets, which is what happens every time. Let's look at your tweets. Now, if you were on Twitter, like in the 2008 to 2018 period, it was a chat room. It wasn't really like a people didn't know you were going to be like pulling their tweets and their job interviews. People were pretty loosey.

And she said like all kinds of crazy stuff, like white men this, da, da, da, da. And whether she was joking or not or, you know, I don't really care if people have like cheeky opinions or their full contact. But for the New York Times, it just gave ammunition to critics every time she wrote something. that she's anti this group, anti that group, super woke, whatever.

And I'm not just calling her out. This happens on the right as well. And it happens far right, far left. Everybody's got some tweet, comedians, whatever, that didn't age well.

And that's the problem. I think the paper wants to be respected for doing good work. So if you've got a warped view of reality, and then you're acting cheeky or crazy or, you know, your comedy doesn't land because you're not Dave Chappelle, but you're trying to make jokes on Twitter

and it doesn't land and it offends people. You're not in a comedy club, right? The context matters. In a comedy club, you say a joke, people go, okay, it's a joke, it was good, it was bad, it's a one to ten, okay, I laughed, they didn't. Let's go on to the next joke. On Twitter, they're like, is that a joke,

or do you actually hate white men? Or do you actually like to use, you know, this word that's not appropriate? Like, or do you use that word all the time? Is that like who you are? Yada, yada. Yeah, absolutely. Part of it is the perception of New York Times journalists is bad.

Yes. And the problem that the New York Times has is in wanting to have it both ways. They want this perception of gravitas and journalism that's above the fray and ivory tower and actually listening to everybody. But they also want stars because people click for stars. So they want to collect personalities and they want to collect them based on their like potentially outrageous tweets. What's so interesting about Sarah Jung is that they hired her, took all the flack for that. And then I think when they fired her, it's because she tweeted about the New York Times. Oh.

She left. She left. Okay. She left. The Times did not announce its departure or her departure from the editorial board in August. But it happened after she tweeted about the New York Times, I think, or wait, no, that was in September. she left in August she is now a contracted contributor

for New York Times opinion the news regarding her status came hours after she raised eyebrows on Twitter over her response to a columnist for the Guardian who was urging against people canceling their subscriptions and she said

oh New York Times definitely pays attention to subscriber cancellations one of the metrics for outrage that they use she wrote to distinguish between real outrage and superficial outrage

was when people canceled their subscription And the New York Times was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You can tweet a lot of crazy stuff, but you can't put out our dirty laundry. And now you're out. That makes sense. They want it both ways. And it's so dirty.

And it's so. And Taylor Lawrence is 100% right about the way the New York Times is a star picker. Right? They're like, we've decided that you can be a star, but you cannot. And we'll choose. And we want that. And we want this like tons of attention. But also we want to be the most respected name in journalism.

It's like, I'm sorry, like, you actually can't have all that. Yeah. It is a, it's a thing. Yeah. It's officially a thing. And I think this is great for the New York Times because as people, as someone who is highly addicted to Twitter, you know, it's a couple hours a day of my life, every day. If you start adding it up, it means they could file one more time a week. It means they can get one more scoop every two weeks.

You know, you live by the gun, you die by the gun. We're kind of one more actual person, you know? Talk to somebody on the phone, yes. Talk to somebody on the phone. I did it like just and then I swear I'm going to stop Duncan on the New York Times, but it, I have history. Yeah, how you work there. I did the How We Survive podcast, right? So one of the people that we talked to, they did this like smooch, smoochy story about this tribe,

that members of this tribe that were opposing this mine and they were had teamed up with these like two white guys who were environmental activists. And the Times like quoted this guy like crazy and da-da-da-da. And they were like, we love him. And then I did a smooth five-minute duck-ducco and was like, huh, that guy actually is an environmental terrorist. Right? Like, it took me five minutes on the internet to find out that he's a co-founder of a group that advocated for the end of industrial society as the only way to solve the climate crisis. And this was the guy who got the full.

He got the poll quote. They quoted him, of course, over the Native American one. woman who was representing her tribe and opposing, like, the reporting is objectively suffering. Objectively. It's obviously suffering. And, you know, when I took my last Twitter break, I finished my book. And then I finished 25% of the new book. And I'm going to start my next one.

I'm going to finish the book this summer. It's going to go summer to summer. Then, you know, I'll just take three months off and do like one tweet a day or whatever. And that'll be my thing. Yeah. Speaking of Twitter? Speaking of Twitter. Our favorite associate producer, Ryan Breslo.

Shout out to Ryan Breslo. Silicon Valley. Associate producer of this week at startups, he blocked me. He was like, I thought we were besties. And I was like, you were on the pod. I don't know your parents' name if you have any siblings. I've never had dinner with you. I was having this conversation with my wife.

And I was like, not sure if this person is actually a good friend of ours. We've seen them 10 times, you know, at social events. But I don't know their parents' name. I don't know their siblings. I don't know how they met, never had dinner one-on-one with them. Therefore, they're friends. Friends. Like, they're associates or their acquaintances.

Acquaintances. So anyway, Ryan was like, I thought we were friends. And I was like, are we friends? Really? Oh, man. Oh, man. I don't know about that. Or something similar to that.

Like, anyway, Ryan is still on his jihad. And he's off of his- Silicon Valley correspondent, Ryan Breslo, reporting today with reporting from the field. His investigative journal is Ryan Breslo. Dancing like a fool on psychedelics.

Joking. Awesome. Joking. So, awesome. He went, I guess he came up with a new term

shadow fired that the Instacart founder was shadow fired, I guess is his claim. He was shadow fired. Shadow fired was, that was me. Okay, sorry.

Producer Nick came up with the term shadow fire. I love Shadowfire. I like Shadowfire. I don't want to misattribute to Ryan. Okay, very good. Thank you.

Also, I would also like my flowers. You get your flowers. I gave you flowers for Sassel. I gave you flowers for Shadowfire. Very good. So, Breslow hot off his creative writing class in all his free time

and his triumphant victory. Just beating Dom into submission and then telling him he would back his next company. Oh my God, he's a master troll. He really is a master troll, creative writer. Poster. and investigative journalist said

he now compares Sequoia to the mafia, Don. And he accused Sequoia of axing the Instacart CEO to pave the way for an IPO as a way to return monies to their LPs. This thing is so unbelievably ridiculous, but I guess we have to go through it

because, yeah. So he doesn't appear to have been 100% wrong about VAS, so. Okay, sure. That's probably. Probably true. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, a lot of times when we know this as journalists, having both been journalists, you know, you're starting to triangulate on a story and there could be some things that are true and then things you're filling in or your mind fills in.

Right. You know, reasonably, but that are not true. He said that they were able to oust the former CEO by hiring Instacart's former CFO Ravi Gupta in 2019 to conspire against the founder and CEO, Apurra. Ra. Meta, meta, yes, I've met it before. So Gupta, I guess, the former CFO became a partner at Sequoia. This is their, his claim. Sequoia obviously led the $8.5 million series A in Instacart in 2013.

So they have a nice chunk of the company. And he basically says if you hit the, the gist of the accusation is that Sequoia was like, we need a liquidity event. And that Instacart is a good option. because the others are continuing to grow really incredibly fast. Instacart's growing fine or, you know, really quickly. So we should push them toward an IPO. And maybe Apurva META did not want that IPO.

And so the idea here, again, according to the Twitter thread, is that by bringing in this CFO who really knew all the dirt, they were able to build a pressure campaign against META and, or META, and push him out and sort of say like, oh, we had managerial chaos. And, you know, he's like, the reasons are, are pretty weak, why they ousted him. Okay. And then brought in this new CEO.

There's two huge flaws here. Number one, Sequoia has been very clear that they're holding their positions in public companies as part of the new Sequoia. They're not trying to liquidate their stuff. So this idea that Sequoia needs liquidity is farcical. So that is like, so even if they did oust the CEO or the CEO was fired for performance, whatever, however you want to frame that, right? Because we're talking about how you frame the CEO leaving.

Was, did they, were they fired for performance? Did they collaborate on it because they weren't doing a good job and they felt like they hit their top? But if you look at the revenue numbers for the company, maybe you could read the last three years revenue numbers. Do you have those handy there? Or can somebody pull those up? Because he did put the screenshots of it. And I think the issue with Instacart was hopefully, got bought. They had a crazy dependency on that. Uber Eats, Postmates start doing grocery. Amazon

starts getting heavy into grocery. And the founder, you know, I think had challenges around massive competition and maybe the company didn't rise to that occasion might be the issue here. And again, I don't have, I'm associated with Sequoia as well. I don't have inside information on this just to super be clear before I get re aggregated on this. Right. But here's the, here are the numbers, right? And let's take into account the fact that these numbers occurred during a pandemic when everybody was ordering everything. So in 2019, Instacart made $735 million, $20, $1.5 billion. Boom, right? Amazing growth.

So they double year over a year during the pandemic makes a lot of sense. And before that, they were up 50% roughly. And they were growing 50% a year, it looks like. But then from 2020 to 2021, which is, again, still during a pandemic when you would assume that a lot of people had built habits around growth. grocery ordering, all of a sudden, revenue slows dramatically. They grow $20 billion to $1.8 billion. They grow.

20%. And the valuation got crazy. It was like $39 billion at the peak. And it recently went down to $24 billion. I think that move was so that they could give employees stock options. But I think that this is made up nonsense, to be totally honest. The only person who really knows, I guess, is the board of why he left. but yeah, I have no idea.

And as a friend of mine pointed out, the new CEO that was brought in, one of Brazil's claims that the new CEO doesn't know anything about logistics. What the new CEO does know, though, evidently is advertising, right? And how to make money on digital products. So there's value in that.

The Instacart product itself, like from a design and usability perspective, completely stalled. Yeah, nothing's changed. Nothing's changed. Zero has changed. I mean, I have this experience. I use good eggs.

I use Uber Eats now. I use DoorDash and Amazon. And they keep adding better and better features. And let's face it, Instacart is the same exact product. And it's not perfect. I mean, the amount of items Instacart gets wrong for order is what for you? Two out of ten, one out of ten. Yeah, I mean, it depends on the day, but it's always something.

It's always something. There's never a perfect door. I do have a perfect order yesterday. I rarely use it anymore, too, because I rarely use it. at some point, you actually can't continue to justify paying a like 40% premium. It's kind of expensive. I mean, you spend 40 to 50% between the service fee and I kind of think there's a gas fee now and then the markup on the groceries and then the tip.

It depends on the size of the order. If you're doing a $200 order, then it goes down to maybe, what would it be 20%? 40 bucks to deliver it. Yeah. So for 200, it's 20%. If you're doing 100, it's 40%. Right. So I think it's order size. Order size is how they calculate the tip.

Yeah, but I'm just saying like there's a markup on the groceries. Right. Like, which isn't used to be a lot more transparent. And like they would tell you which stores had a markup and which stores didn't. And now I'm assuming that they all do because they don't say it anymore. But so the groceries cost more already to order from Instagram. Yeah. And there's a service fee.

And there's a tip. And there's a. And so you like literally will end up paying 50% more than what you would have paid if you went to the store. That's bonkers. Yeah. It's bonkers. It's just not. So I think there are a lot of reasons. A lot of headlines. Why this might have happened. And then, but then of course, obviously Twitter was just in love with the tweet thread, Neil Kosla, tweeting, don't take money from

Sequoia is one of the hotter takes I've seen. I mean, yeah. I mean, like, so I mean, just to recap Ryan Bresla's advice for founders, don't go to YC. Don't take money from all the top venture firms. and create a block against your competitors and win. And, yeah. I mean, again, he did not appear to be 100% wrong about fast. No. So who knows, right?

But even he was like, to be clear, I don't know, I've just heard this from people and I don't know if it's true at all. And then Eric Newcomer from Bloomberg, who's just so great. And I saw you responded to him, said, you know, Silicon Valley loathes the tech press until it realizes that anonymously source stories get replaced with an endless stream of Ryan Bresla's unhinged speculative tweet stores. I mean, it falls into the category of something TechCrunch was doing, which I disagreed with at the time, and I told the founder in the early days, which is they dubbed process journalism. And I was like, what's processed journalism? It's like, oh, it's what Valleywag and TechCrunch do.

We just publish something that comes into the tip line, and then we let the entire audience read it and then ask them if it's true. And I was like, are you guys, danged? Like, that's not processed journalism. that's like slander or just not doing any work. And they're like, yeah, well, we could call people. They're just not give us a comment. So we might as well just float the end thing.

And that's what they, that's what a lot of places did. You can basically say the story now is, I, everybody's talking about this rumor. Yeah. So like, is that really journalism to say like, everybody's saying that this person is in the closet. I mean, this is what Gawker did. They just took people who were instead of saying they were outing somebody, they just said, everybody's talking.

talking about Anderson Cooper. Everybody's talking about Tim Cook. This is when they were both in the closet. And we're reporting on the rumor. It was like, really? Like, okay, fine. You know, just a low level of journal. I don't know how you feel about it.

I think that the New York Times is worried that that some of that is starting to happen to their journalism. Because I will say on the plus side, when I was there, there was none of that. And at one point, I was even like, what about, like, I think this might be, a story and what if we sort of like put out a blog post and to see if it was a story. And it was like, no way. We 100% do don't do that. And I appreciated to in the dropout watching how how realistic that portrayal was of an editor who's like, I'm sorry, it sucks. I know you want to go with this, but you cannot because you don't have it. Get this person on the record. Get the story.

And I did not off the record, on the record. On the record. And I did appreciate that in my time at the times that there was none and I appreciate that about like for example here right we're like we do diligence a certain way that's the deal if somebody doesn't want to participate in diligence it tells you everything you need to know you know like if you don't want to have a board and you've raised 10 million dollars you don't want to have like insurance or have a board or have like if you don't want to run the company professionally like yeah why would you raise money for a company then like that's kind of the idea here is to do that we you know we have so much more to talk about, just to give you a preview of tomorrow's show,

things we didn't get to on the docket today. Bloomberg sources, there's a, there's beta versions of Apple's iOS 16 going around that have some references to mixed reality headsets. We'll talk about that tomorrow. Epic. We're going to talk about Epic raising a bunch of money

and a $31 billion valuation. Why they might be doing that. We might get to the Peter Thiel Bitcoin speech. We have to get to the Peter Thiel Bitcoin speech. This is so much show that we can't. So we'll see you all on tomorrow's show. We're also going to be interviewing the CEO of WorldCoin for an episode that I think will drop on Wednesday or Thursday.

So we've got a lot of great show this week, this week in startups.com, YouTube.com, such this week in. And do a search for this week in Startups, Australia, if you want to listen to Mark Pesci's version of this show from Down Under. I was the first guest and give him a subscribe and a like and a review. It's a great interviewer, a great human being. And he's on his 10th season. The Allens Summit is sold out.

Gave 250 tickets to, on scholarships, a lot of underrepresented founders. And we got the gender. We got the gender balance in the audience worked out. Looking pretty dark there for a minute. I was like, I don't want to go to this conference in so many dudes. I was like, 90% dating, 7% dudes. No, thank you. But you were pleased to know.

I'm not at that. Two out of, it's good, yeah, we're almost at 40% female. That would be a good goal. I mean, when's the last time we went to a tech farmer, that was 40% female? Yeah. Nope. Not, doesn't exist, right?

Doesn't exist? 20%, 30%, I guess would be the norm. I think in that range, I guess, yeah. I don't say normal is the average. Right. Normal would be. Yeah, no, I think 40% is good. Now, if we can get to 40%, if you can get that speaker.

I got the speaker. I got the speaker problem worked out. Amazing. Your insights were not, your private insights to me were not incorrect. I'll just leave it at that. Let's just say there might be some besties who people want to be interviewed by less than other besties. And so it becomes a little bit of a challenge sometimes. You know, on these polarizing times, it's just, you know, some people just don't want to even participate in an event where people have a difference of opinion than them, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

All right. We will see you on this week and start. tomorrow. Bye, bye. Bye, bye. Hey, everyone. Producer Nick here. I want to tell you

about the SaaS Syndicate. If you're a founder of a SaaS company with a product and market, our investment team wants to talk to you. Head over to the syndicate.com slash SaaS, S-A-A-S to apply to raise from the SaaS syndicate. And you can join Jason's syndicate

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