This Week in Startups - Emergency Pod! Huge Bitcoin correction, Robinhood IPO rumors, Squarespace direct listing | E1219

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

Emergency pod! Bitcoin sees a major correction due to China's crack down (1:46). What are the chances it could it go to zero, and could China banning crypto be a blessing in disguise? Robinhood is ru...mored to be going public next month (14:14), what will their market cap be at IPO? Plus Squarespace goes public via direct listing (26:10)!

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:02 It's an emergency podcast. The cryptocurrency space is in a massive crash. Bitcoin, $30,000 down from $65,000. Stick with us. It's a complete and utter disaster. You probably keep hearing about Stock 2 compliance and you think, hmm, this is really relevant to me? Well, if you're targeting any large enterprise as a customer,
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Starting point is 00:01:36 SecureFraM-E.com slash offer slash twist. You got to put those two slashes in. Secureframe.com slash offer slash twist for $2,000 off. It is a complete and utter disaster in the crypto space today. Bitcoin has crashed massively.
Starting point is 00:01:53 It hit an all-time high of 64,000 on April 14th and has had a steadily decline. This morning, it was at 30,000. And this is, actually shocking. I don't think anybody expected this part of a pullback. I actually didn't expect it. I didn't think it would be this hard of a pullback, but I was very clear on my Twitter that I thought because of the reopening, stimmy checks running out, unemployment benefits running out, and people wanting to Yolo go to EDC and go to Coachella, that the amount of energy, time and resources that
Starting point is 00:02:27 people would put into Bitcoin would correct. Now, I put a correction at 20%, not 50%, which would have been like maybe down to 50K, but something we didn't expect happened. Not only are people taking their my thesis, a lot of people who maybe were buying Bitcoin and small amounts were now thinking, well, maybe I'll cash in some of that and plan my summer vacation. Or I've got to go back to work. Maybe I could use that money for something.
Starting point is 00:02:54 Maybe I want to buy something that's a little more secure like Amazon or Uber or eBay or, you know, pick the company, square. Obviously, I own some of those names. I believe this was going to happen because people would go back to life and because Bitcoin always corrects, right? We had Bitcoin at 3,000, just I think 18 months or 24 months ago and I was dunking all over the place like, my God, this could go to zero. I do believe Bitcoin zero is a possibility. I thought it was like a 30 third to 50% possibility a couple years ago. I put the concept of Bitcoin zero or close to zero, like under $3,000 or something of coin. I put that now at like 10%. I think There's so many folks in the corporate world who now believe this is a reserve currency and
Starting point is 00:03:36 like gold, that it'd be very hard for it to go completely away. But it is quite possible, and I say this over and over again, and I'll say it again, that a better technology than Bitcoin could replace Bitcoin over time. Now, would that happen overnight? No. You know, people did not give up AOL and Yahoo for other news sources overnight. People didn't give up Facebook for Instagram and, you know, Instagram for TikTok. overnight. A lot of times things stick around for a long time, but transitions do happen, whether it's the
Starting point is 00:04:06 transition from AOL and dial up to broadband or, you know, the transition from going from hotels to Airbnb. But things can still exist. So we'll see. The thing that is particularly interesting about what happened today is that once again, China is sending mixed messages, but perhaps this is a pretty strong one that they're going to crack down on cryptocurrencies. Now, Now, this has been an ongoing dialogue, and I have told people over and over again that China is the type of country that could turn off Bitcoin instantly. And naive Bitcoin maximalists and naive young people say they can't stop it. You have not been paying attention.
Starting point is 00:04:49 Jack Ma was the most powerful person in all of China, and he got neutered, and he disappeared for a month. Who knows where he went for a month? Have you seen Jack Ma? I think people have seen Jack Ma. one time in the last six months. And Hong Kong protesters just totally got wiped out. Tiananmen Square, look it up. They ran tanks over their own young people protesting for rights and, of course, the Uyghurs. We have a genocide going on according to all human rights organizations and the
Starting point is 00:05:17 majority of Western countries that millions of people, because of their religion, are enslaved labor. Do you really think, do you really think that the Chinese government, will make their top CEO, their Jeff Bezos, disappear, take an entire religion and commit genocide and sterilize them and force them to work in cotton fields as slaves? Slaves! Genocide! They will take an entire region like Hong Kong and roll over it,
Starting point is 00:05:47 roll over their own people literally with tanks, and you don't think they can stop Bitcoin. Really? How dumb are you? Really? You don't think that they could overnight go, boom. No more Bitcoin. and that every single person who owns Bitcoin there would stop mining Bitcoin, turn off the mining,
Starting point is 00:06:05 and never, ever do a Bitcoin transaction again? That's exactly what would happen. If you were a Uyghur right now, would you go into the street and host a public religious ceremony? Would you, if you owned a bookstore there, would you allow people to buy the New York Times? Of course you wouldn't, because you go to jail immediately. You people are so naive. This is not the West. this is a communist country where you do what the government tells you to do.
Starting point is 00:06:32 And if they don't allow books and they don't allow CEOs to become popular and they don't allow religion, do you think they're going to give up their financial system to a bunch of people in the West? No, I'm sorry, Pomp. I am sorry Bitcoin maximalists. You are being phenomenally naive. Now, does China not participating in Bitcoin actually present the end of Bitcoin? No. Does it take away a market of over a billion people? Yes. Does it get rid of some percentage of the mining capacity? Yes. It might actually be a short-term pain for long-term gain. One of the reasons people are not bullish on Bitcoin. And one of the big, you know, question marks is, do we want to put our money into a system controlled by a communist authoritarian country? That's the reason I don't want to
Starting point is 00:07:24 participate in it. It's one of the reasons why I think it has to be stopped in some way or controlled is because if the U.S. dollar is not the reserve currency and Bitcoin becomes that, and they own a large capacity of the mining in China, that is a national security risk. Well, if it becomes a national security risk here in the United States, then the United States will then insist upon controls for Bitcoin. Getting China out of the picture, that actually would make Bitcoin more sustainable. So for y'all who are selling your Bitcoin into the scary China thing, okay, that makes sense in one way.
Starting point is 00:07:59 But in another way, getting the authoritarian communists off of the blockchain and getting them off of participating and having control over some large swath of this, of course it's decentralized, but a large swath of it is actually in China. Beijing on Tuesday banned financial institutions and payment companies from providing services related to cryptocurrency transactions. There were already bans in place, but this announcement made clear that institutions must not accept virtual currencies for payment, nor can institutions provide exchange services between cryptocurrencies and the one or foreign currencies.
Starting point is 00:08:32 Price of Bitcoin fell below $34,000 for the first time in three months after China imposed fresh curbs on cryptocurrency. Some analysts argue this China announcement was not news, just continuation of an existing policy. So, obviously, when you're dealing with an authoritarian country like this, It's hard to know who's actually, you know, making this statement. And they are pretty opaque about things. If you ask the Chinese government to explain what's happening to the Uyghurs, if you ask them to explain what's happening in Hong Kong or Jack Ma, you will have them say, what about racism in the United States? What about Trump in the United States? What about fentanyl? That they're selling us.
Starting point is 00:09:06 They will point to all the problems in the West. They will not address any of their issues there, which is fine. That's their prerogative. But in December of 2019, and I hate to dunk or you know, basically pull up things that I said that were super obvious. But in December of 2019, I did the following tweet. BTC Ultras have lost their minds if they think the Chinese government can't control track and ultimately ban Bitcoin usage at any time. They put you in jail for running a VPN in China, a virtual private network, you know, when you obscureify your IP address. Think what they would do if you ran an underground Bitcoin network. I can tell you what they would do. They put you in re-education camp. You'd be tortured, murdered, and then you would cut, or if
Starting point is 00:09:47 were lucky enough to survive, you would come out and give a public statement about how horrible you were to the country and how much you appreciate China. That's what would happen to you. So in 2019, a man was in fact sentenced to five years in jail for running a VPN. So again, Bitcoin Maximilist. My Twitter handles at Jason, please come at me and explain to me why they would put somebody in jail for five years for a VPN, which just allows you to trade information privately when they wouldn't do that for somebody who has a Bitcoin position or is challenging the sovereignty of the Juan? Are you crazy? As of April 2020, China is responsible for 65% of the world's Bitcoin mining nine times more than the U.S. in second place, according to the University
Starting point is 00:10:32 of Cambridge. While these bans, four financial firms do not impact the miners directly. It could impact miners businesses by making it harder for them to exchange cryptocurrency for Yon, which is needed to pay the electorate bills and servers. So that's pretty obvious to everybody. And as I've said, maybe this is better. This might be better. And in April of 2021, billionaire and fairly brilliant individual Peter Thiel, whether you like him or not, he is brilliant.
Starting point is 00:10:58 Not, I would say we're a friendly and acquaintances, but we're not like besties. We don't hang out. But I do respect his intellect and the bets he's made, even though I think it was a crazy, silly move to back Trump, a really bad move on Peter Thiel's part. He said Bitcoin could be considered a Chinese financial weapon. Here's the quote. Even though I'm pro-Crypto, pro-Bitcoin maximalist person, I do wonder whether at this point Bitcoin should also be thought of as part of a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S. The PayPal founder said, it threatens Fiat money, but it especially threatens the U.S. dollar and China wants to do things to weaken it. He's absolutely right, hard for people
Starting point is 00:11:32 to admit, but it's the truth. And that is a Bitcoin maximalist. So this could be ultimately good thing. Getting all those servers and that capacity off the network means Americans, Europeans, people in the West, South America, India, any other country that has a democracy could maintain control of this and that would be better. As you know, back in 2011, I wrote a piece, Bitcoin, P to P currency, the most dangerous project we've ever seen. This is in 2011. And I wrote, Bitcoin is a P to P, peer to peer currency that could topple governments, destabilized economies and create uncontrollable global bazaars for contraband. It's pretty clear that that's exactly what has happened. This could destabilize economies. And here we are a decade later after I wrote that piece,
Starting point is 00:12:21 people are now saying, hey, what are we doing here? Is this going to screw with the dollar? Is it going to screw with China? I think you could see the West take positions next, which would be massive regulation, perhaps even cryptocurrency taxes. So imagine a specific tax, on cryptocurrencies that are not put on other things. So if we feel the US dollar is suffering as compared to cryptocurrency, our government has a very easy way to do that. 10% tax every time you buy or sell cryptocurrencies on top of whatever taxes there are, a cryptocurrency premium. If we felt the US dollar was that threat, the US government could do this at any time. If you don't think they could, I encourage you to look at what happens when you buy a pack of cigarettes,
Starting point is 00:13:05 which should cost 50 cents to a dollar 50 and in some cities, I think they cost over $10. We are allowed to tax things in the United States if the United States feels that Bitcoin is a threat, which, let's be honest, the crypto maximists are saying that this is their solution to the US dollar. Do you actually think the United States government
Starting point is 00:13:26 is going to allow the US dollar to be at risk as the global financial reserve currency? And you think you're going to be able to stop it? Okay, how are you doing with your... How's Napster world? Are you using Napster? No. You're using Spotify. There's a thing called the law and there's a thing called taxes and there are things called armies. If you threaten a country, a communist, authoritarian one or a democracy, they both have tools for managing that risk. So again, be careful out there.
Starting point is 00:13:55 If you've made millions or billions off of Bitcoin, my advice remains the same. Buy yourself a house or two, put some money in Amazon, Uber, Tesla, other great companies, Apple, Disney, Netflix. Companies you have a relative assurance will be here in 10 years because Bitcoin might not. Okay, and our next news story, Robin Hood, which I am lucky enough to be an angel investor in through the launch fund number one, my first fund where we put in, I think about $50,000 into Robin Hood before they launch. Today, there is a rumor that they are going public next month. We've heard these rumors before, I have no information. When I'm a tiny angel investor, call it under 100,000, you generally are blind. You don't get information rights in the startups you invest in. So with Uber,
Starting point is 00:14:45 Thumbtack, and Robin Hood, everybody thought I had all this information because I was friends with the founder and I was an angel. When you're an angel at that small of a level, you don't get information. You have zero influence other than the relationship you might have, you know, with the founders. You can't go to the building and show up. You're not at board meetings. In the later investments I did in my career, let's say in the last three or four years, generally I had a board seat and we owned five to 15 percent of a company on average, either a board observer seat or a full board seat. So I would have more information. So I'm just saying that up top so that nobody trades on this information or thinks that I have inside information. You as a user of Robin Hood
Starting point is 00:15:26 or as somebody who reads the news likely has more information. than I do, or as much. But according to Bloomberg, Robin Hood plans to reveal they're filing for an IPO as soon as next week and targeting late June for its market debut. This is obviously great for myself and other investors in the company. It has been just an amazing ride. They've raised over $5 billion to date, including that emergency raise of $3.4 billion in the middle of the GameStop saga, which we talked about on the All In podcast, a number of times. free game stop and that whole drama. Reuters reported that they had a $20 billion target valuation.
Starting point is 00:16:06 I don't know what they mean, Reuters by $20 billion target valuation. I don't know if that means when they go public or what their shares were trading at in the secondary markets, secondary markets, rich people who want to buy shares in a private company will offer you. I get offers for Robin Hood and Com and previously Uber literally weekly. There are all these brokers, it's really weird and they just keep asking you, do you want to sell your shares. And obviously, people want to buy your shares in a private company, you probably want to hold on to them. And that was, we never sold a share of Robin Hood before the
Starting point is 00:16:37 IPO, nor will we. So, or in all likelihood, I never say never, but when a company's growing and people want to buy your shares, pretty good sign you want to keep going long. So according to data from Rainmaker Securities, the secondary shares, according to reports, were trading at a $40 billion dollar valuation in February of 2021 after the GameStop saga fueled massive downloads. Robin Hood downloads in late January compared to its competitors were extraordinary. If you look at the chart, which they're going to pull up on the YouTube channel, you can see that Robin Hood over that period from the Wednesday, January 27th, when I was in Tahoe skiing with my family, just massively spiked on Saturday and Sunday,
Starting point is 00:17:21 with over 300,000 downloads a day. 300,000 doesn't sound like a lot, but for a trading app, that's a lot. I mean, this is an app where people are going to be doing finance. It's not like Twitter or something or a photo sharing app. This is a pretty serious app. And as you can see, you know, that was massively more than, you know, the traditional Charles Schwabs and TD Ameritrades of the world. On January 4th, it was downloaded over 600,000 times alone. So this has been quite an extraordinary run for Robin Hood. And a lot of people ask me, is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? It's a fantastic thing that young people understand how to do their finances. This is an amazing thing for society. Now, some people might say, oh, young people are too stupid or young people don't know what they're doing. Young people are the ones who create these companies. Young people created Facebook, Microsoft, Google, et cetera, et cetera. And young people are very strong. smart. Their brains are very elastic. And once you're over 23, 24, you have some pretty good ability
Starting point is 00:18:30 to make long-term planning. There is some long-term planning issues when you're in your late teens and early 20s, of course, when you're in college and you do stupid things. But people in college are going to parties and doing keggers and betting on sports and going to Vegas and trying to beat the house at Blackjack. I would much rather see young people doing puts, calls, and buying shares and trading on the public stock market, then playing blackjack or, you know, going to keggers and whatever. So let's put all this in context. People are going to gamble. And if you take the least charitable description of online trading and you say it's gambling, well, people are doing that anyway and they have the right to do that with their money. Now, if you look at it as they're educating
Starting point is 00:19:14 themselves and yeah, they might win or lose a thousand dollars here or there. Okay, that's fine. That's the time to learn how to do it. I wasn't doing this kind of stuff early in my career. And when I was doing it, I would say 25, I started to dabble. You had to call somebody on the phone to make a trade. And then they charged you $50 to do a trade. So if you wanted to buy $200 worth of a stock, you paid a 25% fee, which then throttled your ability to learn, whereas Robin Hood doesn't charge and everybody gets to experiment and learn. I don't, I've never traded a put or call in my life. People on Robin Hood, young people understand these things much better than a 50-year-old J-Cal. So I think it's pretty amazing.
Starting point is 00:19:54 To the point, Christopher Mims, who is at Mims on Twitter, he's pretty good at Twitter. The Robin Hood effect. During the pandemic has closed one gap between white and black investors. 63% of black Americans under the age of 40 are now participating in the stock market, the same share as white Americans. And that is extraordinary. Just think about that. 29% of young black Americans became first-time investors in 2020 compared to 16% of white Americans.
Starting point is 00:20:23 is a massive win, a massive win for the democratization of investing and for equality when it comes to wealth creation. And this is what solves the problems of wealth inequality, is getting more participation in equity markets. Not Bernie Sanders, not Elizabeth Warren, not taxing people, not wealth redistribution. That's all nonsense. Nobody wants a handout. People want to be empowered. And if you talk to anybody who lacks power and you say handout or education and empowerment, they're going to pick the latter. The only people who pick the former are these wacky socialists like Bernie Sanders. You know, come at me at Jason on Twitter.
Starting point is 00:21:04 Another tweet, Robin Hood is going to crash next week when everybody tries to short Robin Hood when an IPO is from Lillie Frank is doubtful, but cynical take. And tweet number three, it'd be hilariously ironic when Robin and IPOs and everyone tries to short it and cause it to have a mega short squeeze. I would not short a company that adds hundreds of thousands of people per day, and that has the amount of love that Robin Hood has, and that has weathered the storms that Robin Hood has. This is one of the great fallacies of startups. When startups hit a storm, if they make it through to the other side, they have now become more resilient, not less resilient. So every time you have a crucible moment as a founder or as a startup, you become
Starting point is 00:21:52 stronger. You become battle scard. That happened to Google, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, when people, meth heads were trashing apartments. If you take this kind of advice and you try to short Tesla when they miss a date for a car and then they wind up selling a million of those same cars, you are a fool. I really think you have to be very careful about what. when I start up, trips, being the Simpsons guy who goes, ha-ha, because if you make that bet, like Professor Galloway and, you know, no skin in the game, Professor Galloway, you will look like a fool as he has when he said Uber, Airbnb, and Tesla, we're going to lose 90% of their value.
Starting point is 00:22:34 Don't be a professor, no skin in the game, and make stupid calls like that. You know, it's quite possible that things will slow down for these trading apps as stimulus, stops getting sent. Obviously, stimulus had a big part in this. And maybe as crypto wanes, and we'll get to that, and we talked about that earlier. So yeah, sure, things could slow down, but is it going away? No. Is Airbnb going away? No. Google, Facebook, Instagram. Are these things going away? Amazon, Netflix. One of the things that happens in startup land is when you get escape velocity. You have now made it to orbit. If you make it out of the Earth's atmosphere, the chances of you coming back down to Earth are very slim.
Starting point is 00:23:16 You have made it to orbit. And that's what Robin Hood, Com, Facebook, Instagram, Tesla, these companies made it to orbit. It's very hard for them to come back down to Earth. In fact, Yahoo and AOL, it's taken them 10 years to come back down to Earth. And they still got bought for a couple of billion dollars. So even when things are going poorly, you know, for like companies that are clearly in the Rivium Mirror like AOL and YOL and Yon It takes decades. They still have a billion people using those services. Very hard when you get escape velocity. The old guard, TD Ameritrade, $130 billion market cap. E-trade, owned by Morgan Stanley,
Starting point is 00:23:54 $150 billion market cap. Chal Swab, $130 billion market cap. Fidelity, $13 billion market cap. So Robin Hood is the Charles Schwab. It is the E-Trade or Ameritrade for this next generation, and it's a better product and it's easier to use. They obviously make money. from this order flow, payment for order flow, which people are opting into, kind of like advertising where you give a little bit to get something for free. But there's a $5 optional membership to Robin Hood Gold. Gold. Payment for order flow makes up 40 to 55% of Robin Hood's revenue according to business of apps. So if you split the difference, we'll call it 50%. You got 331 million payment for order flow in Q1 of 2021 according to securities filing.
Starting point is 00:24:42 and if that's half of total revenue that would put their revenue at $662 million for the quarter, and your times up by four, you got about a $2.6 billion run rate. That's if it doesn't grow in 2021, or maybe it slows down, who knows. But it's fine to just take four quarters and times it by four, and let's call it $2.6 billion. If you had a $40 billion market cap, that would be a 15 times revenue, which is pretty reasonable in this market. So I think 30 to 50 billion is where this will wind up. And I could see trading double and it could be a $60 to $100 billion company out of the gate.
Starting point is 00:25:18 And if you're going to buy stocks, obviously do your research. My belief is you should buy stocks that you're willing to hold for 10 years. If you're willing to buy the stock now, you should be willing to hold it for 10 years. That's my personal philosophy. I've been an Uber shareholder for, I guess, 11 or 12 years, 12 years now maybe. I like to hold things for the long term. If I love the company, I love the management team, and that's the case here. I think there'll be a great singularity. I think Robin Hood, Coinbase, wealth front, all these services are going to provide everything eventually. I don't have any inside information. But if they're doing crypto and stocks and managing your cash, you know, I wouldn't be surprised someday of Robin Hood gave mortgages or Robin Hood had bank accounts and checking accounts and all this other stuff. You could see all that being one singular service. And I think, I mean, I'm talking my own book here. I think Robin Hood will be a trillion dollar company in the next decade. That's my personal belief. I'm long the company.
Starting point is 00:26:08 have been since I met the founders. In other amazing news, Squarespace, my friend Anthony Castellina's company, Squarespace did the direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange. You can see the founder, Anthony, on episode 112, not 1,012, but 112. That was over 10 years ago back in January of 2011, and he's going to come back on the pot soon. We know one person who was super excited about this direct listing, right? Three ways to go. public. Basically, you can do a traditional direct listing or a SPAC. Direct listing, all the shares go out at once at this one price and everybody can freely trade it and you don't have people flipping the shares or insiders not going along, which my good friend Bill Gurley, who you can follow on Twitter,
Starting point is 00:26:57 B. Gurley, his tweet, another direct listing tomorrow, great to see so many courageous and intelligent founders look after the interest of their employees and shareholders, smarter and more elegant approach. Sure beats Witt giving away equity for free. Say no to 30 times oversubscribed. And what he's talking about there is what he's been preaching, which is the people who get screwed when the banks oversubscribe these deals and then have this first day pop are the employees of the company who have to hold typically for six months. The investors in the company have to hold for six months plus and who don't flip their shares. And the company sold shares at $30, let's say, and then it triples or doubles,
Starting point is 00:27:35 well, they would have gotten twice as much or three times as much money. It would have been more capital efficient. The traditional IPO seems to be waning, and I think we will see more people taking this brave approach like Spotify did or the SPAC approach. You can follow the ticker SQSP. I love Squarespace.
Starting point is 00:27:52 It's an amazing site, an amazing service, and I've watched them grow and add services to it. They started just as beautiful websites. Then they added e-commerce functionality, SEO functionality. You've heard me read the ads here on this weekend startups for close to a decade. They've been a great partner of this podcast.
Starting point is 00:28:07 They assigned what's called a reference price of $50 a share, which puts them at a $6.8 billion market cap. They recently raised $300 million at $10 billion valuation. So this valuation is a little bit lower, but there's usually conditions in there if it does go back that the investors in that previous one get extra shares. Who knows if that's the case? A lot of investors like Tiger Global, Dragonier, Excel,
Starting point is 00:28:31 General Atlantic Tiro Price and Pidelity dipped down into that private funding, and we covered Tiger Global's aggressive strategy with Everett Randall on episode 1207. He wrote that great blog post, one of those young guns who we like having on the podcast. 2020 revenue, 621 million of 28%. That's a high growth company from 485 million in 2019, and it's a software company and it's a subscription company. So it only gets better. That's why subscription companies do great, whether it's consumer subscription like Calm and FitBod and Steezy and musician, tone base, or it's SaaS like Slack or Salesforce or Zendesk. Subscription businesses are amazing businesses because every month you start with somewhere between 90% and 110% of what you had last month, whether you have high turn or you
Starting point is 00:29:17 have land and expand happening. So 94% of their revenue is subscription based and they added 700,000 new subscriptions in 2020. That's phenomenal. Like is it Netflix or Spotify? Of course. not. This is a business service, but it is doing amazing. Squarespace was profitable in 2020, recording about 30 million profits, which is crazy. Like, why are they profitable? They should be in growth mode, but that's a pretty healthy sign if management can make it profitable. That's a big debate. Should you be money losing and growing really fast? Or should you be profitable? They chose profitability. That's fine. But their valuation would put them at 10.9 times, the $6.8 billion dollar valuation of their revenue to their multiple.
Starting point is 00:30:00 So that's, again, pretty reasonable in today's market. Squarespace, you know, had a tiny loss of $10 million in Q1. I think people would like to see them invest probably more. And this is the craziness of being a founder of a public company. You can have one group of people saying, why are you profitable? Take an Amazon or Uber or whatever like approach, Tesla to build, build, build for the future and get to scale and see how much market you can capture. While other people are like, be boring.
Starting point is 00:30:26 and, you know, show profits and, you know, be a money printing machine. Both of these models work, and typically they work at different points in time. Squarespace, 2021 run rate, $750 million. Pretty great. You have some other competitors like Wix, which is at a $1.2 billion run rate, and they have a $12 billion market cap. Shopify, obviously, a $3.9 billion run rate. So there's a great cohort here.
Starting point is 00:30:52 GoDaddy obviously does domain names. I think they started long before. Squarespace, but Squarespace is in the domain name business. You have Webley, which is owned by Square now, and they had 625,000 paid subscribers at the 2018 acquisition. So web publishing is a great business, and it's a great cohort. Congratulations to the team. It's crowded, but it's a fantastic, fantastic market. And one has to wonder, when does WordPress go out? Automatic owns WordPress Tumblr, and their last public valuation was $3 billion, which is probably, you know, grown now by four or five times that.
Starting point is 00:31:28 We had Matt Mullenweg on Angel's season 4 or 5 and so I think he talked about possibly spinning out and doing spacks when I pressed them on it so I wouldn't be surprised if we see a WordPress or some of their other
Starting point is 00:31:44 products spinning out and going public. So congratulations to the team over there. Hey everybody. I just wanted to put a little end note here. A button, a cap at the end of the podcast and let you know that. I love talking about what's in the news and giving you my opinion, and you've responded that you really enjoy when I talk about the news.
Starting point is 00:32:02 I get that all the time. So we've hired another producer here at This Week in Startups, and I've decided that every day at 10 a.m., I am going to spend some time in front of the camera talking about the top two or three news stories every day. The podcast is now four days a week or so, and obviously on Fridays I do the All-in podcast, so I'm a five-day-a-week podcaster.
Starting point is 00:32:20 So check your podcast reader and your downloads, I'm going to comment on the top three news stories, four news stories every day going forward. We're going to try to get to five days a week. And thanks to all the sponsors and partners who are making that possible for us, you can show your love by clicking on their links. And when you buy their services using the Twist Code or whatever it is, and thanking them on Twitter, that's super helpful for us. And if you made it to the end of the episode, here we are in the second decade of this
Starting point is 00:32:49 week in startups. And I named it this week in startups so I could do it once a week. and now it's basically becoming a daily show. So we're not going to change the name. But like some people who do the daily at the New York Times or Ben Shapiro or Scott Adams, those people doing a daily new show, I'm committing to doing that pretty much until the end of this year and see how it goes. If you like it, please tweet it. Please retweet us.
Starting point is 00:33:14 Tell your friends about the show. We're still going to do interviews. So the format of the show will likely be some news up top followed by an interview. or some other content like Ask Jason, etc. But we're always going to start with that news and chop it up between us. Okay, thanks for tuning in. Love you guys.
Starting point is 00:33:33 This week in startups is brought to you by Secureframe helps hundreds of companies get enterprise ready by streamlining Soctu compliance in weeks, not months. Get $2,000 off your first year by going to secureframe.com slash offer slash twist.

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