This Week in Startups - Ex-FB Diem team builds Aptos blockchain, Metamask parent ConsenSys raises $450M, Mojo's athlete betting market, Zero Grocery shutdown | E1409

Episode Date: March 16, 2022

First, we discuss a new Layer 1 blockchain called Aptos, valued at $1B in a recent round led by a16z (2:42). Then discuss MetaMask’s parent Consensys raising 450M at a $7B valuation (39:47). Our startup of the day is Mojo, which is building a stock market-like product to “bet on athletes” (51:35). Next, we do a post-mortem for our "shutdown of the day," Zero Grocery, a grocery delivery company that closed down this month after announcing raising $12M a month ago (59:06). To wrap, Jason chats with JJ Foster, a listener who did some show notes for us (01:11:05). Show Notes (0:00) Jason and Molly intro the show (02:42) Former Facebook employees raise $200M to build out blockchain (14:55) OpenPhone - Get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at https://openphone.com/twist (16:13) Thoughts on Facebook and centralized currency (28:22) Mercury - Banking built for startups. See more at https://mercury.com/twist (29:40) Breaking News: Bain Capital Crypto hires woman partner (36:27) Gun.io - Get $250 off your first developer hire at https://Gun.io/twist! (39:47) ConsenSys raised $450M Series D valued at $7B (51:35) Startup of the day: Mojo (59:06) Shutdown of the day: Zero Grocery (1:11:05) 05 Jason mentors noti gang member JJ Foster about his career Check out The TWIST Podcast Notes: https://www.thisweekinstartups.com/notes FOLLOW JJ: https://twitter.com/j_foster_j FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everybody, hey everybody. We have another all-news show for you today, and it's packed. It's a thick boy. It's got a lot of crypto. We're going to talk about new layer one blockchain developments from the team that almost brought you Libra and DM at Facebook. Now they've got a company called Aptos valued at a billion dollars in a recent round led by A16Z. Holy cow.

And obviously, this was founded by the former Metter and Facebook employees. So we'll talk a little bit about the history of that product and project and what it means that it got killed in terms of the bigger picture. Because it's really the first time you can think of that Zuckerberg didn't knock off a product and put it in market. And what if he had? And why didn't he? There's something going on here that we need to figure out. There is something going on here. And despite crypto evaluations tanking like crazy, they're still raising money.

We'll talk about MetaMask's parent consensus raising $450 million at a $7. billion dollar valuation. And we have our startup of the day, my favorite segment, Mojo, a startup that's building a stock market-like product so you can bet on athletes. Fascinating idea. I love gambling. I love the market. What a great, interesting idea in our startup of the day.

And then a little something different, a post-mortem for our shutdown of the day. Zero grocery, a grocery delivery company that just announced raising $12 million a month ago is now shutting down. We're going to dig into what might have happened. It is all going to be such a great show. It's going to be a great show. And I do a quick chat at the end, a little mentoring session with a super fan of the show, one of our Notie Gang members, who wrote 10 sets of show notes as part of his way of breaking

into the industry. He met me. He met a bunch of other people in the industry. And now he's working in the industry. So I have JJ, Notie Gang member JJ on, talk about his career. And I think if you're looking to build your career, this is going to be an amazing segment for you. It's going to be an amazing show. Stick with us. This weekend startups is brought to by Open Phone. As a startup founder, a lot of mistakes are easy to roll back on, but using your

personal cell phone number as your company number isn't one of them. Open Phone makes it easy to get business phone numbers for you and your team, right on top of your existing devices. Visit Openphone.com slash twist to get 20% off your first six months. Mercury. Question. How many times have you wasted managing your company's money? Answer, too much. Switch to Mercury at Mercury.com and gun.io. The simplest way for anyone to hire world-class developers expertly vetted for you by senior engineers. Get $250 off your first hire at gun.io slash twist. It is another news day. We talked to so many people last week that we just piled up a whole bunch of stories that we cannot wait to talk about. And news keeps coming, including this very interesting story today about former meta, you know, Facebook, Facebook employees that worked on Facebook's failed crypto project, which was alternately called DM and then Novi.

These former employees have now raised $200 million at a billion dollar valuation to build out Aptos, a layer one blockchain, very closely resembling what they worked on at Facebook. Okay. Mm-hmm. So that's interesting. It's not the, because my understanding was Facebook was going to spin out what was Libra. Yep. Slash DM. DM or whatever.

Yep. Yeah. Might be Aptos. Depends on whether you live in the town. Some people call it Aptos. Some people call it Aptos. We're not sure which one it is in this case, but we're finding out. The different protocol layers of blockchain, just so you can understand this layer one blockchain thing.

layer ones are the underlying architecture, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Salana, basically the blockchains themselves, the distributed ledgers themselves that projects are built on. Layer two are projects built on top of layer one, which increase the functionality like the Bitcoin Lightning Network, for example. And then layer three is basically like NFTs, right? Or blockchain-based apps, games, defy, anything that is consumer-facing.

So it's kind of a big deal that what these people, people are saying is that they're going to build a core blockchain. To go after Ethereum and Bitcoin competitor. Yeah. All right. So Molly, what happened to the original IP? That was Libra, because this is actually, I think, one of the most interesting stories of antitrust that never has been told. Yeah, exactly. There never was an antitrust action here, but they decided to not launch it, which is the most anti-pirest. pirate, Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg thing to do is to not launch a product for fear of

regulation. Yet somebody pulled him aside and said, do not launch this, which I would think would be like waving a hundred red flags at like every bull in Spain. Seriously. But that tells you how serious it is when you start coming for the US dollar. Yeah. Like when you start coming for the world's reserve currency, I wrote this piece around the time that they were first talking about DM and Libra. And we have the entire history to break down in a minute.

But essentially, the piece was like, look, even a failed Facebook product. Like I gave the example of Facebook stories. You know, they announced it on Instagram and it crushed, but they had stories on Facebook. And that was considered like a dud. And a dud for Facebook is 300 million users. Like, yeah, only 15% of the user base created for it or something. And so if 15% of the user base had engaged with Libra

and started using Libra, and there are 325 million people in the United States, like overnight, you have a legitimate currency threat. And I guarantee that the people who pulled Mark Zuckerberg aside and told him to knock it off were the heaviest hitters on the planet, is my guess. Like who? Like a senator, a congressman, a lobbyist, a former president, internal people, venture capital.

capitalist, Mark and Dresen. Way worse, central bankers. Gotcha. Like, everybody thinks they know where the power is. The power is with the central bankers. Like, I'm sure that, like, the Fed, Christine Lagarde, you know. Yes. All of these, the big money hitters came to him, maybe even Peter Thiel, although

probably not because he wants to see the world burn. He probably came to him and was like, definitely do you, bro. So here, here's what happened. On January 31st of this year, Facebook announced they were divesting and selling their assets of their crypto project, a silver gig. Gate Bank for $200 million. Now, they worked on that project with hundreds, if not, with thousands of people for a couple of years.

So being able to sell it for $200 million, probably gets them out even or something, I would guess. So it's kind of a push. They probably sold it at the price. And maybe they have a little upside in it. You never know. But let's go, I would like to know the history of what happened with that crypto project. And then you got to think about the IP.

I mean, one of the nice things about Americans' IP system is, you know, if you start over and you built something from scratch, as long as you didn't bring the documents with you, you're good. Yeah. Well, let's walk through this and see if we actually really think that this new team is all that different from the old team. So Libra, as we know, was officially announced in June 2019, which I know feels like 150 years ago. Yes. Like, wow, that happened, 2019?

It was supposed to be a stable coin. So backed by a basket of currencies. Cal Libra was supposed to be the associated crypto wallet on Facebook, which users could then use for all of the good things this promises borderless payments on Messenger and WhatsApp. Facebook was like, we're barely involved. We're just setting it up, but we are not going to be the holders of the back end here.

However, nobody believed that at all. Facebook had all this regulatory scrutiny, Visa, MasterCard, Stripe, and others actually pulled out because that attention got so intense. Because remember when they announced it, they had like everybody on board. It was like a fait accompli. They had every major platform. I think like even like Airbnb, Uber, everybody had put in like $10 million, $5 million to join the Libra, stable coin, whatever.

And then I guess they would get some, you know, access to that. And the idea was an Uber or a Lyft could support this stable coin currency. And then banking fees and everything would be free. So when you're paying people who are moving money around, it would be free. But let's pause for a second here and realize in June of 2019, I remember I was in Australia for launch festival. This is before the pandemic started. And I remember because I owned at Libra, the Twitter handle, they were trying to buy it from me. And I was like, sure, give me a $100,000 consulting arrangement.

I can't sell it to you. And I'll consult with you how to use the at Libral account. And like literally they were like, okay, we'll send it to you. But you need to talk to us on the phone. I was like, no. I'm not talking to people on the phone. But, I mean, they were, they understood that stable coins would be super important. Not in June of 2019.

They must have been talking about this for two years before that. So in 2017 or 2018, somebody there was like, we need to just do a stable coin. This was long before Tether hit mass scale and before USDC even existed. So they, I mean, do that. They were really early. Yeah. When, like, what would happen if they had launched this and they had 70 billion or 100 billion or 200 billion in stable coins out there? Oh, my.

Lord. I mean, it would have been earth-shattering. It actually really would have been profoundly transformative to the financial system, which is exactly why I assume the big guns came in. So all of the scrutiny, and the scrutiny was sort of like there, but again, it didn't feel any stronger than anything else that was happening in terms of scrutiny. So it does make you wonder what was happening behind the scenes because all of a sudden these big partners started dropping out. In May 2020, they pulled the ultimate parachute move, a rebrand. You know how I feel about that. Jeez.

You know, you're in trouble and there's a rebrand. Cal Libra became Novi. And then in December 2020, Libra, rebranded to DM. Yeah, it's like, don't look at this project. You've never heard of this project before. This is not the project you're scared of. There never was any Libra. Yeah.

There was only DM. Yeah. We're starting fresh. Yeah. You hated Facebook, but you're going to love meta. Exactly. We're not dumb. On January 31st of this year, which you may have, I will forgive you if you missed, because some things have been going on.

Facebook announced that it was divesting completely and selling the assets of this crypto project to Silvergate Bank for $200 million. And now, fast forward to right this second, when most of the team that originally worked on that has left, we don't know the current status of those assets, but we do know that this new company, Aptos, just raised $200 million at this billion. valuation led by A16Z with participation from Tiger Global and Multi-Coin Capital. And they're essentially saying, we wanted to build that thing there and now we're going to build it here. Straight up. Wow. Build it. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the stuff is built on open source software or, you know, previous projects. You can fork a previous open source project. That's why there's all these forks of, I think there's a lot of forks of Ethereum, forks of Bitcoin, obviously. And so, you know,

And that's why you had so many of these what they call ish coins. You can add the S if you want. All of these coins were created because it's so easy to fork. So they're probably just taking some base of open source software and moving on with it. And I don't think Facebook wants to chase down former employees and sue them for a space they're not participating in. Wouldn't it be surprised if Facebook owns some shares in it? Exactly. Yeah.

I don't think they're all that separate. Or Zuckerberg invested in it and just did it on the slide. So a lot of times when somebody's leaving your company, what a savvy person will do. I've done it a couple times myself is say, okay, I understand you're leaving to do a startup. Can I give you the first 100K? Can I give you $250 on the way out the door?

So if you are thinking of leaving your company, you know, if you leave on good terms, you hire your replacement, which is what I always consider like the chef's kiss of like leaving a company is to just tell your boss, hey, listen, I want to start a company. I'm totally willing to stay.

If it takes, you know, three weeks or takes 10 weeks, I'll find my replacement. I'll train my replacement and I'm available to you for 10 hours a month, you know, for the next year if you need me, you know, at whatever my hourly rate is, to consult and make sure you have just the smoothest transition ever. And here's my new plan. I'd love for you to be my first investor. Like, just take that script.

If you're like a senior executive, like you say that to your boss. They're like, okay. But the CEO of this new company told TechCrunch, to be clear, we have no formal relationship with Facebook and no investment from them. Them being Facebook. Them being Facebook. Let me tell you how you get around this. Mark Andreessen?

Well, he's on the board of Facebook. And he's an investor in this. Yeah. Now, I wonder if Mark Andreessen, if he has any high net worth individuals in his funds or their non-profits, you know, their endowments. and I wonder if they would disclose if they had a major LP. So.

Yeah. I mean, you just have to wonder. Zuckerberg is certainly an LP and, or I would not be shocked, I shouldn't say certainly. I would not be shocked if he was an LP in Andresen Horowitz's funds. I mean,

how can it so hard to imagine that this thing is spinning out that the, the CEO of Aptus is explicitly saying, this is a quote, we are the original creators, researchers, designers, and builders of DM, the blockchain that was first built to serve this purpose, while the world never got to see what we built, our work is far from over. Like, it does sort of beg our belief that Facebook and its executives

are in no way involved in this. And the real question is, will the same, you know, heavies, the same like big wheels who put the stop to this back then, believe that there is no connection back to Facebook from this new company? Yeah. I mean, there's probably no explicit one where they have no control. So a non-controlling investment would, you know, if they wound up

owning, if, you know, Intreason owned 10% and Zuckerberg was 1% of his fund, he would own 10 basis points. So, you know, you can kind of back into exactly what the exposure would be and it's probably de minimis. Listen, lots of founders are Lucy Goosey with their personal numbers. We all know that. They put it on company documents. They use it for sales calls and more. And that's where things get super messy. You don't know who's calling you, right? Is it a sales prospect? Is it a coworker? Or is it somebody from your kid's school? Is it spam?

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employees fielding those incoming texts and the calls. What a brilliant idea. See what open phone can do for you. It's already affordable at a starting price of just $10 a month per user. So affordable. And Twist listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first six months by signing up at openphone.co slash twist. And if you have existing numbers from another service, no problem. Easy peasy, lemon squeasy open phone can port them over for free. Just head over to OPEN, p-h-o-c-c-c-c-c-c-o-c-c- twist today. Openphone.com slash twist today. And this, because this is not going to be backed by the distribution channel of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. That I think is the question, though, is what if Facebook immediately turns around meta and becomes this thing's biggest customer? Like, oh, it's so weird. I was just built on these protocols and it perfectly integrates into Facebook and WhatsApp.

I mean, the power move for Facebook would be to just create a crypto wallet and let people who are on Facebook Plus, you know, pay $10 a month to have a crypto wallet over there and then let the wallet, let you use any coins in the wallet to do the marketplace. I understand the Facebook marketplace does particularly well. I don't know if they break that out in the revenue. I would be very interested to see what percentage of revenue

going, you know, their take rate for that is or traffic is marketplace. Have you ever used marketplace? You know what? It's really good. I've never used. I don't use this stuff, but I hear it's incredible. It's the only reason I still have Facebook on my phone for it because I never, ever go to Facebook, but Facebook Marketplace is amazing. Like, because I just moved, you know, whatever a year and a half ago and I bought all this good. I'm trying to not buy new things.

Yes. But they have a lot of new things, too. They have a lot of sort of like Wayfair type stuff. I assume it's a little bit fell off the back of a truck, but it's Facebook Marketplace has good stuff on it. Yeah, I've heard it's pretty amazing. Yeah. I'm a big game. So, you know, with all these projects, I think what's going to happen is, um,

the government is going to highly regulate stable coins. I think they may cap the size of them and the scale of them, the number of participants in them. I know that sounds crazy. But you could create some ground rules where there was some taxation on them. So if you want to run your own currency, you need to pay the government 5% on all transactions or 2% on all transactions. Something to keep them from overtaking the actual U.S. dollar is going to have to be done. Or they could just be banned outright. And that would be the legal case of the century.

And I think that's where we'll wind up is we're going to have some Supreme Court case. I'm going to predict it now in 10 years. Somebody is going to say, you know what? I'm going to take on the man and I'm going to take it all the way to the Supreme Court that I can create my own currency in the world. And that'll be an interesting moment. And I think I don't know the answer to what's better for humanity. If the government controls currency and can do the funky stuff it does, like save the economy.

you know, by printing more money during a pandemic, or if it would be better if this thing was distributed and nobody controlled it and you were, you know, in control of your money, or nobody was in control of your money, or there were 20 different projects where you could splash your cash around and have all these dark pools of capital. I don't know. What do you think, Molly? Do you think net net humanity would be better off if governments had less control of finance? Over money?

Over money. I mean, this is sort of. Partly what we were talking about with Molly White, right? When she was saying, you know, that you almost can't underestimate the radicalism in, embedded in the idea of money that has no centralized control whatsoever. That means there's no tax collection. There's no, you know, government-sponsored health care. There's no visibility into how cities are doing or states are doing or businesses are doing or

individuals are doing. You know, do governments overreach unquestionably? but I think there's probably a reason that our society has evolved in this way. Like if you want a city to work, for example, you have to have a mechanism for taxation and in a completely decentralized currency, just as one example, a completely decentralized currency world that just like could never happen. We did have, I mean, in fairness, right, we did have the underground gray economy off the books economy where

I remember my dad's restaurant in Brooklyn there were certain employees who got made off the books. I think that still happens where there's a cash economy but the cash economy is occurring I wonder if the, what do they call it,

the gray market or the underground economy? I wonder what the size of the underground employment economy is today. You know, the untaxed economy compared to where it was in the 80s, 90s, you know, over the last five decades. Because a lot of the people I meet who are service providers and who maybe would have been part of that are now using things like Venmo, PayPal to receive payments. And I know that those report.

Venmo recently started. Yeah. Yeah. So if that is the case, then people are opting in to being tracked for the convenience. So the convenience of being able to, if you were a gardener, let's say, or a dishwasher, the convenience of getting or a babysitter getting paid by Venmo is greater than having to report your income. Yeah. I mean, I don't think there will ever not be an underground currency economy, right? And there's every possibility that cryptocurrency will continue to exist as a mechanism to send money more anonymously if we end up in a cashless society.

like without the ability to anonymously exchange cash, something will crop up in its place because they're always going to need to be people who like do crimes, right? William Gibson calls the $100 bill of the international currency of bad shit because it's like the most popular bill used by all kinds of criminals and warlords

and drug dealers and whatever. Like there will always be a version of the international currency of bad shit. But I don't think centralized currency ever goes away. I mean, that's the foundation of countries. If you had quarters, you mean currency. They were talking about making a thousand dollar bill for a while and then they specifically didn't do it because of like money laundering and yeah,

I mean, I for many years did not want any of my transactions recorded and I just went all cash for like a decade when I lived in L.A. Because I was playing in a lot of poker games that settled in cash. I stopped playing in them because, you know, I was in casinos in other places and I was like, I don't want to carry this much cash with me. And like, you know, I'd win a game. I'd have $20,000 in cash coming out of the commerce casino. I'd have to have two security guards with guns,

walk me into my car kind of situation. Because people would get knocked off, leaving a casino or something. And that's when I just stopped carrying that. But I would pay for everything in cash. And I was very interesting to think, I don't know if you ever had this thought where I was like, I want to have a record of all my transactions,

like to look back on someday. Like when I was in Italy, where did I go and look at my Apple Watch and see that and what, you know, this place in Italy. I bought this ice cream. So I actually do that now. I'll go back and look at some transactions when I was somewhere. Look at my Instagram when I was in Tokyo to remember this coffee shop we went to that has like the handmade, you know, coffee where the guy whisks your whipped cream for your mocha, you know, to order. It was incredible.

That would be such a cool feature. That would be such a good argument for something like a digital currency. Like you think about the layers that you could build on top of that. I mean, certainly that's possible with any transaction now. But it would be so cool to have like a NeoBank. that also gave you like neat visualizations and hooked into your I mean this could exist right now actually if you just used it like if you had a neobank with a debit card and use that debit card for everything and then it could hook into your like photo album right give you like it's exactly like the Google photos a year ago you were in Sydney or two years ago you were in Sydney your credit card should be like your Apple card should be like by the way the last time you were in Sydney here are the places you went yeah and give you a list you give it to you the week before you know Like a picture of the food, you know. Yeah, absolutely.

Correlated. There was a- It would be so fun. Turn your spending into content. Exactly. There was a company called Blippy that we were investors in that then became top hatter. And if somebody pulls up a story about Blippy, Phil Kaplan from F company and Distro Kid had made this, he had co-founded Blippy with a couple of people.

And the idea was you sync your credit cards to Blippy and that every transaction you make on whatever card would be shared with the community. And then you could see in your community, hey, look at all these people are going to this new blue bottle place. All these people are going to this new salt and straw, you know, place. And then you could comment on other people's transactions. It was pretty cool.

Isn't that what, I mean, Venmo. Venmo does that now too, right? Or had that. I don't use Venmo, but does Venmo automatically share every transaction? Or you opt into sharing it with your network. I think it originally was by default. It might still be, I turned it off a long time ago. It's not a lot of default.

That is good. Yeah, what I heard from a lot of people, people was, people were like paying their weed dealers on Venmo. Oh, yeah. And then people are like, yeah, that's my weed dealer too. It's like, uh, it's not quite legal in your city yet. And they came up with all these emoji. They would still share it, but they would come up with these emoji that like meant weed.

Yeah. Oh, so they put like a tree and then a puff of smoke. Yeah, pretty much. By burning trees. Very good. Uh, so anyway, good luck to these folks. Uh, do remember any company worth a billion dollars before their product is launched, uh, is under the auspices of Jason.

rule, which is it could be a fraud and or a failure. It doesn't mean it's destined to be, but you are certainly putting yourself in the Veranos, Quibi, Magic Leap bucket, Nicola, who else is in this bucket? We've found a large number of companies, Rivian. If you're something that you were really talking about that I can't remember now. Anybody, anyway, there's no reason for any startup to be worth a billion dollars before it launches his product. If it is, oh, the Alto Health. Was it Alto Health? Was it Alto health, the one we were talking about the other day, that Bezos, Alto's health raised like $3 billion.

So healthcare might be an exception to Jason's rule, but anyway, I put a big red flag next to this startup because, yeah, that's a huge valuation. And with no product, you know, if they're going to be worth a billion dollars, 50 times top line revenue for the hottest valuation you could get in today's market 25 times, I mean, it puts it at $20 to $50 million in revenue just to fill into this valuation and, you know, to get an idea of like how much that is. Like, are you making $100,000 a day every day? Yeah.

You know, that's a lot of money. Presumably you have regulatory headwinds. You maybe don't own the IP that used to have before. Like, are they literally starting over? Like you said, a lot of it's over. Yeah. There's no reason not to start over it. One of the greatest things you can do in a project is to throw away the old one and just start

from scratch. Yeah. Oh, it's interesting. time. Head jobs in our Noddy gang points out, Klinkle and Color. These were the original overfunded startups. So Color was a serial entrepreneur who had sold a company to Apple,

and they famously had raised like $40 million, and it like broke the internet and broke the startup system. And I think Sequoia actually had backed them. It was a serial founder, and he wanted to raise a Series A. And then I think they were like, why don't we give you the Series A of $5 million

and the Series B of, you know, 20 million at the same time? And they just raised a ton of money because they were going after Instagram and like social networking which was a big thing so they just put a big bet in. So, you know,

that wasn't crazy because it wasn't a billion dollar valuation but that was the start of the overfunding parade. If you search for Klingle, they gave a ton of money to a group of kids who just couldn't execute and they gave a ton of money to color,

which was a color.com which was going to be a social network and that was a serial entrepreneur who was overfunded. Oh, here's the blippy site from 2011. And we could show that here. Let's pull that up. This is worth taking a look at. There's Klingle. Oh, thank you. My producer is doing a great job today of being in the zone with us. And here is Blippy.

Zoom in on that. There's in our brains. Yeah, if you zoom in on that, so what does it say there? Oh, $198 credit card purchase. Right. And you can see how a social network, this is very web two, you know, and it's execution here. This is, you know, not an app. It's just a website. But you can see people talking about, you know, what they're spending money on. And if you're spending money on something, that means it's important. So there you go. How much time have you wasted managing your company's money? I'm guessing way too much.

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All banking services provided by Evolve Bank and Trust. I'm sorry. Breaking news has distracted me. The Notie Gang, for those people who are listening to the pod, we do this live every day at 10 a.m. and it's YouTube.com slash this weekend. And during the live podcast, you know, 100 to 300 people concurrently hang out with us.

They're called the Notie Gang because they turn notifications on. So when you go to YouTube.com slash this weekend, you can subscribe to the channel. Thank you for doing so. We're almost like $200,000. But you can hit the bell next to it, which means you get a little alert. And every day when we go online

or when we post the episode, you get an alert. And then you can talk to us. So when Molly and I are doing the news, these Notis are so smart. The notice are coming up with incredible news stories. And then they make us laugh. So there's like a combination of like standup comedy, trolling. Legit community. Legit community. And then legit associate producing. And then our actual producers monitoring Twitter just to make sure that nothing happens, such as Bain Capital,

Crypto. Wait, this is a breaking news story. Bain Capital Crypto is no longer a dude shop. a robust. Big news, everyone. Bain Capital Crypto now has a lady, lady, lady. We have a token lady, lady, lady. God, I hope is a brilliant I am just going to assume is brilliant and capable and unbelievably deserving of this incredibly fast turnaround higher. Yes. Bain Capital of course,

Bain Capital Crypto of course is the fund that we dunked on from our glass house the week that we ran all men on the week of International Women's Day here on this podcast. I stand on my I stand on my record of hiring women to work for me and investing in women. We had almost the exact same.

Yeah, we're definitely going to add to... Your responsibility, Molly. Any issues around gender are your responsible? You're more woke down. You know, I like to call myself Molly made in my spare time. I just clean up after the boys. No, but seriously, next week, can you protect us and just program Women's Week?

Please, can I give you some lady work to do? Seriously, you're I'll do the lady work. So anyway, what is remarkable about this, Bain Capital, of course, we dunked on them on International Women's Day for posting the most

stock art photo ever of the seven partners that they were privileged to announce in their new fund, Bain Capital Crypto, which not for nothing, has $155 billion in assets under management. Did you say billion?

Billion. And they got dunked on hard. There was a heartfelt apology and a commitment to hiring more women and people of color. And I think we should give them the benefit of the doubt and say like, you know what? Message, they took the note. And they took the note. Got it done. A week later, they were like, we've got a partner.

Stephen, uh, is it Cohen? Was it Steph Cohen? Yeah. Stephen or Stefan Cohen. Steppen Cohen. Uh, congrats. I said last week, I didn't think you had any bad intent. Sure, it was clueless.

Sure, it's easy to dunk on. Sure, somebody should have pumped the brakes when they show the image. All that, it can be true. But I assume good faith. We all do. And we assume that you, I said, let's give this team six months. And here you are, six days later. So I think, you know, and congrats to, is it Lydia?

Lydia. Yeah. Lydia who's joining. I think. I assume, yeah. I'm guessing what happened here is like the perfect teachable moment, beer summit moment. Like, I just loved how Obama handled this stuff. I mean, I just miss Obama.

I miss, like, competent leadership that can communicate. But anyway, a beer summit learning moment. Yeah. You got it wrong. You fixed it. And now everybody is going to root for you. And we should. We should give you the benefit of the doubt and root for you.

It should be room for people who make mistakes to fix those mistakes. To fix your mistakes. Like, I know that there's going to be another round of dunking, and I will caution anyone who thinks that this is their opportunity to undermine Lydia and to assume that somehow she might not be as good and that they hustled her up as a, you know, an apology or a token or a poster. Don't do that. Assume that she is the badass who got overlooked the first time and that that has been corrected

and that is great. That is a great thing. I think that's such a, so well said, Molly, because there is now, after these guys drop the ball, the worst reaction would be to be like, oh, look, they hire to diminish Lydia. Exactly. Who, in all likelihood, they said, hey, Stefan, dummy, look, there's a hundred incredible women. And these are the top four in our estimation. who have the best track records, the most knowledge,

who are the biggest brains with the greatest networks and the hardest work ethics, would you like an intro? His, I would assume his inbox on LinkedIn and his email and his DMs filled with introductions to qualify candidates, because he probably said to his network, I'm a dummy,

please help me fix this, you know, unforced error, which is what I would have done. I would have been like, wasn't, I'm a super dummy. Somebody helped me figure this out. So congratulations to Lydia. let's assume that she's going to be the most talented person on the team and the end. She came from Red Point, which is super legit. And yes.

And honestly, and sincerely, like, way to take the note. Guys, you know, they could have doubled down. We're in an era of Double Down. And they didn't. And I think that should be noted and applauded. Yeah. This culture of like social media destruction is like, it's kind of built into the video game where everybody's like, oh, there's the boss.

It's boss level. Let's all, you know, Leroy Jenkins jump into the fray. And, you know, the dynamic is so weird, especially on Twitter. The way Twitter works with quote retweets and retweeting and trending topics, it's just the rage machine. And it's nice to see, like, it could also work in another way, which is to laud good behavior and, you know, evolution of individuals who got it wrong. Yeah.

All right. There's your breaking news. That's our breaking news. When you said breaking news, I assumed Ryan Breslo had tweeted something. So I was like, oh no. I mean, not yet, but the day is young. We're only half hour into the show. Still early.

There could be a Ryan Breslo tweet at any moment. Hiring software engineers takes a long time. It can take months in many cases. I see this in all the companies that I invest in. They have some blocker. What's the blocker? We need more engineers. So gun.io is going to change that for you.

Yes, there are software developer hiring. platform, and here's what makes them so different. Their candidates are expertly vetted than match to your company by a team of senior engineers, not by an algorithm, not by a recruiter, and not by happenstance, which is how a lot of this goes down. Gun.io developers have eight plus years of experience building products, and they're used to working directly with founders and executive teams, like startups, right? Fast growth ones.

They can get your candidates as quickly as 48 hours, and the average time to hire is only two weeks. 90% of the candidates are U.S. based, and, you know, And they have a network vetted international candidates too, so if you're looking to hire from another market, they have you covered. There are two ways to use gun.io. One, you can work with a freelancer and enjoy gun.com's ongoing support services. They'll handle the billing and swap out talent for free at any time.

Or you can hire a remote developer directly from the gun.com network for half of a typical recruiter's fee. So here's a call to action. It's going to be really easy for you. Gun.io is the easiest way for startups to find and hire world-class developers. and you're going to get $250 off your first hire at gun.io slash twist. Super interesting day, actually, week in the crypto space. Two more big fundraising announcements before we moved on. What is going on?

I thought crypto crashed and all this money is flying into it too. But you know, this is the original buy the dip community, right? Yes, that's true. You thought that it was actual traders, but they're just like, yeah, we're buying the dip. And now the VCs are into buying the dip. They are into it. Consensus is Metamask's parent company, which built a suite of Ethereum-based products.

They just raised a $450 million Series D. So they do have a product, but at a $7 billion valuation, who led by Parify Capital with participation from SoftBank and Microsoft. Metamask has over 30 million monthly active users and is the most used Ethereum wallet, which excluding the web browser Brave.

Yeah, $7 billion. for a wallet. Yeah. I mean, so the wallet is but one part of the business. It's got a developer toolkit for building on Ethereum with 430,000 developers using it. In Fuera, this product that they make helps developers read and write information to Ethereum, which competes with Alchemy. And we apparently had Alchemy's founder and CEO, Nikiel, on episode 1238.

Yeah, I mean, this is one of those like sort of middlemen situation where I'm not sure how all the money gets made, but evidently a lot of money gets made. I guess developers pay for the set of tools or they get a piece of the transaction to be one of those two, but it is pretty amazing to think that these companies are raising this amount of money at a $7 billion valuation.

I mean, yeah, I guess it's shades of Amazon web development. And I guess if crypto finds use cases other than store a value, which is a use case, or it doesn't really work for money transfer unless you're in an emerging market that has a broken banking system where they don't allow PayPal,

they don't allow Venmo or other cross-border transactions. I wonder if Amazon will just add these kind of features to Amazon Web Services. And I think, if I remember correctly, IBM had done their own

AWS offering for blockchain tools. And I think it, I don't want to say it failed, but it installed. So I think it was too early. But yeah, I mean, interesting that we now have even more money going into crypto during a down market and still not a lot of use cases. This is taking an awfully long time to build up the infrastructure. When I compare this infrastructure to the infrastructure of the web, you know, if we play this out, like I remember web servers in 94, 95 being $30,000. And then five years later, let's say, 1998, 99, 2000, you were buying them for $1,500 and

racking them yourselves. And then, you know, T1 to your office was, you know, 5,000 or less. And then AWS, five years after that, you know, whatever, you know, early 2000s cloud computing started to emerge. So if we were to put 93 to 2003, it was a 10-year journey from like everything being extracted and being in a web service in the cloud and people racking servers and them going from $30,000

each to, you know, let's say $1,000 each. So 90% cheaper. I'm looking at sort of I wonder if a comparison to is the internet to the web. Like I'm trying to see, you know, like

so DARPA had the internet connected computers in the 70s, right? And it was like, Fairly connected, yeah. Right, fairly connected, but not like multiple computer, not the web. Not the web. The web didn't exist, right.

The web, they could connect multiple computers, but you couldn't, like, search them. You couldn't sort of see across all of them. And it was the web that enabled that. And that was, I think, a 30-year. Yeah, actually, that would, that ARPANET might be a better corollary. If we were to, if, just so you know, DARPANet, for people who don't know, was the military's version of the internet, ARPANET was the advanced research projects agency, which was more for colleges.

And that started in, you know, the 70s. I'm trying to depend on the timing, yeah. So 70s, 80s, 90s was 30 years of this. I guess that's probably right. Worldwide web invention. 93, 94. Okay. So 20, 25 years.

Because I sort of feel like that's almost how early we are with blockchain. If you were to do it. concept, right? Like to sort of mature into a usable product. So yeah, okay, so I guess I can sort of understand how your AWS version of crypto makes some money. Now we have gauntlet. And your observation that it's, you know, if you look at it as the web and the

commercialization of the web in 93, yeah, we're super far behind. Right. But if you look at it as the 1970s in Arpanet, DARPANet's evolution over those 25 years or so, we're arguably on time or maybe a little bit ahead. Right. Yeah. Right? That seems fair.

I think that seems fair. It seems fair. I do think this collection of Web3 technologies might be overblown and might be a little religious, like distributed, you know, blockchains that are immutable and run by anonymous servers, not anonymous servers, but by a collection of, you know, various nodes may not be the most optimal for every use case. So, you know, the private blockchains and centralization might actually make for a better consumer experience. And I think that's this weird religious distributed thing. And we had this, if you remember, in the early stage of the internet,

Wired was always like, information wants to be free. Information wants to be free. There was something to that. And then there was also something to artists need to get paid. Writers need to get paid. There needs to be a business model associated with this to make it sustainable. And we have been hand-wringing and fighting this battle for now three decades on the web. And it is, right. It's really true. Like you look at, for example, just the fact that we don't use the web on mobile devices, we use apps.

Like that all by itself was a, that was an evolution away from open standards. Like we slowly went away from open standards to Facebook, to Google, to, you know, big gatekeepers, to content aggregators. Wald gardens, yeah. And walled gardens. Yeah. And I have yet to see technology develop in any.

other way. I mean, we still have the RSS standard. We still have the podcasting standard. And we even see in podcasting now, maybe people are trying to tinker. And whenever anybody starts tinkering with those standards, everybody's got to be up in arms. They stop screwing with the open infrastructure of podcasting, Spotify, you know, other folks. Like support the standards or Gt. But podcasting itself might be too open to make real money, right? Like, it has struggled to find a truly sustainable business model other than advertising and advertisers are like, oh, we don't, we don't get enough visibility into what happens with the ads. It's enough to sustain some of it.

But if you really want to be the HBO of it, like Spotify seems to, you may find yourself wanting to tinker with the standards. It would follow the evolutionary path of every other technology is all I'm saying. But you do also have Patreon and you also have people reading ads, inserting ads, and people doing podcasting and making the money from. whatever their day job is. So having a podcast and then being an investor, having a podcast and being an actor,

having a podcast and being a television writer. So it does see, or a substack newsletter. So the unbundling bundling war and who pays for content keeps happening. Is it patronage? Is it subscriptions? Is it consolidation and a group subscription? Is it advertising?

It's all of those things. The open standards should occur independent of that. So people break the open standard in order to get an upper hand and get additional power, which we hate. We hate. I think we hate. I think I speak for everybody.

I hate that. Yeah, don't break the open standards. Facebook loves that. Facebook, this is why I think anybody who's a content creator opts out of Facebook. You can't even share a freaking post from Facebook. Like if somebody sends me a Facebook post and I'm like, oh, I want to send that to someone. I mean, it's just like absurd. Yes.

More open standards equals better. And I think that that is the perfect, I mean, that is the perfect crypto use case that still hasn't been nailed, which is the distributed. version of Facebook. That is just delightful without advertising. I mean, why can't the crypto community with all their unlimited resources stop raising money and selling tokens and NFTs and flipping and painting the tape? Stop all the nonsense.

And will one of you qualified people or 10 of you just make a Facebook killer already? For f***ic sake. You've got to be both of those out. But it's so fucking annoying. I would even take a token. I would buy 100 tokens for $100. if somebody would just make this. I would back this.

I tried to back this so many times. I'd literally just make an exact replica, an open source exact replica of like classic Facebook friends or functionality that nobody owns and that you control your group and it's distributed the end. It would be so beautiful. It exists in Ministry for the Future, which is Kim Stanley Robinson's book that all the climate people are reading.

read this. It's really, really good. It's like this phenomenal book about the sort of UN group that's in charge of like trying to fix the climate crisis and then all the financial and bureaucratic tools that they enable to do it. And one of the things they create is a blockchain based privacy oriented social

network where then everybody gets a token and they own their own information and they all start doing. It's like called you. Dotgov or I don't even remember, but it's something has you in the name. But what's so interesting is that then everybody ends up owning what is in effect carbon coin. Like it ends up being a really disruptive financial tool also. It's very, very clever. That's a book group

recommendation. Yes. And then if everybody's doing this like buy the Constitution or buy, you know, classic cars or, you know, Nintendo cartridges and Michael Jordan's rookie card, all do respect for this nonsense. Restore the internet. Yeah, like there's other things that collecting a group of money would do better. Like, I love this idea of like, instead of buying the constant, you know, 13th copy of the constitution, take that 40 million and buy public land, put it into a trust to never be developed again. Like, let's make cool stuff that actually is transformative and doesn't line your own pockets. That's the problem why people hate crypto people. It's because 99% of crypto activity is flipping, bag holding, painting the tape, you know, grifting. And one point,

percent is like technically interesting and of that one percent that's like technically interesting. 0.1 percent are projects that are world positive. Like more world positive stuff to make it less about you flipping stupid, you know, meaningless NFTs of monkeys and punks and Gary V friends. No offense to any of those projects. I mean, I love art. I like art, I guess.

Do something meaningful in the world is my point. Totally. Yeah. All this. Can you imagine all this. and money putting to crypto. And then, like, I ask you, like, what's the three things you use crypto for in the last 30 days or the last year?

If you would ask any American, tell me the top three things you did with crypto in the last year. And you'll get a few of them who are like, well, I made $80,000 and I cashed it out. And I, like, you know, paid off my student loan. And so, like, I'm glad that that's happening. Well, no, I mean, some people made legitimate money, right? Because there was this, like, boom. People who were very clever, flipped it.

Exactly. Yeah. Trading. Like to me, trading is not like a very interesting world positive thing, but okay, fine. It might be individually positive, right? And that could add up to some positivity, but that's only as long as the bubble lasts. And for every person who did that, there are going to be like 10 other people who lost all their money. It's like some Mary Kay cosmetic, multi-level marketing, you know, whatever that.

It is. It's MLM for dudes. It's MLM for bros. Like, this is Mary Kay or what was the herbal life? Oh, yeah, herbal life. It's like Herbalife and Mary Kay. for tech dudes. That's literally like the use case.

It's just as a challenge. Make something that people use and get value from outside of speculation. And I do think NFT art and NFT clubs, like I ask them, the producers here to get us in on this NFT. This is like an incredible idea because it's based on that Spanish cooking clubs, right? The private cooking clubs. This is like a two-parter. It's like this crazy cultural phenomenon in Spain where people have these like sow houses

where you can cook for your friends for gourmand's. And so imagine you went to Sowell House and you could go in the kitchen and just make whatever you want and you cook and clean yourself kind of situation and you buy all your stuff at the farmer's market and it's across the street from that.

So in Spain I guess I have these cooking clubs. So if like you were into golf, this would be like if you were into food. So you and I could go there one week and say, hey, Molly, you want to make cassoulet, the French dish that takes. It takes 24 hours. We yeah, let's do a Castile thing with our friends.

And everybody goes and makes Casuale and it takes 24 hours and we come back the next night and we drink some wine the first night. And the next night we actually in the afternoon invite all of our other friends to come and part part part part. Oh, I'm doing this. If it comes out, I would totally join us a member. Sounds incredible. All right, Molly, it's time for my favorite part of this weekend startups, which is the startup of the day. The startup part. Yes, the startup part where we get back to our roots and talking about new incredible

projects in the world. Mojo, M-O-J-O is a startup building, a stock market-like product to bet on athletes. They've raised $75 million in funding led by Thrive Capital, Tiger Global, Jet.com, founder Mark Lurie, and Alex Rodriguez, I'm assuming the baseball player, also participated Mojo-List Alex Rodriguez, A-Rod as the co-founder, but he will not be involved in day-to-day operation. Mark Lorry's quote to Bloomberg on building the platform, I've always thought the idea of a sports stock market was the Holy Grail. The vision could transform sports and fandom as a whole for years. I've heard people throw around the idea, but nobody had been able to do it for the concept to truly work. You need underlying principles like intrinsic value and

instant liquidity. Mojo's product is slated to launch in the fall, and we'll focus on American football as its first sport. The CEO is Vinit Bahara, which is interesting because Bahara is also the last name of Prit Bahara of the amazing cafe. It's his brother.

And this is his brother. And to even put an interesting rub on this, Prit is known as the guy who shut down poker when he was the New York Attorney General because gambling was illegal at the time. And his brother is creating

I believe this is a, would be best described as a prediction market, also known as a gambling site. And this is great. Fate loves irony. And here we go. If Freight's brother, if Prete becomes the attorney general again, does he have to take action against his brother? I don't think so. The laws have changed. Obviously, you know, the Supreme Court is now allowing or they overturned all that state.

And now states can make their own decisions around wagering. But this existed in the Hollywood stock. exchange, HSX, and that was a way to bet on your favorite artists. And the idea would be you could buy stock and an artist. It would be a limited number of shares. And then people could buy the shares and it could be a way to bet on things. So prediction markets are a big deal. Yeah. I guess the Hollywood Stock Exchange may still exist in some fashion or we might be looking at the wayback machine. What am I looking at here, guys? B.J. Novak just IPO today, everybody. So, wow. B.J. Novak IPOed? Okay, that's going to be trading under that. Not just an actor. Children's

book writer, wrote a really funny children's book. What's so, you know, it's so interesting that... I like BJ Novak. I take it back. He's cool. Yeah, I like him. Yeah, that's a funny book. The book with no pictures. Yeah, it's funny. It's a good children's book. It's funny. I just think that this whole...

Way to ruin childhood, BJ. Question of, like, this whole question of fractional investing, fractional betting, like the, what is the prediction markets, creating all the fact that Toby, one of our founders of university grads, as in has created something similar, as in our Noda gang, Toby Jang.

It's, do you love it? Is it like the kind of thing that can only exist when there's like so much money sloshing around? No, it's, um, listen, people love to gamble. There was a website called in trade, but this thing when it came out, um,

a decade ago became super popular because you could, you could propose any bet and then people would take either side of it. And it would kind of like be a great way to, understand the world. Yeah. Because when they have skin in the game, these prediction markets allow people to bet on anything. So that could be something as silly as the coin to us at the Super Bowl,

which are called prop bets, prop bets, proposition bets, or where one person says, hey, I'll bet you heads, you bet tails. Or you and I could do a prop bet, you know, Dremont's plus or minus, which was 24 and 20 minutes in his return yesterday, which is insane that anybody would have that big of an impact on a game. But here's one. We could make a prop bet. How many episodes will Prof.G's CNN Plus series last?

Or you could do something that's actually important, which is you can make a bet on how many days will the war in the Ukraine last. Now, this seems silly and weird. But when people start making these kind of bets, what it leads to is people being thoughtful about predictions and thoughtful about handicapping things. This is very important for society. If you can get really smart people to place bets on the probability of things happening, you understand the world better because they have skin in the game. And almost always things like in trade or I think there was one called predicted or these prediction markets, they nail things like elections because people will then put a lot of effort

into trying to understand the world. So is it gambling, yes, but it's informed gambling. And then because it's a platform, everybody gets to make some sort of decision on, what stock do I want to buy? So let's say you went to the summer league in Vegas, which I've always dreamed of doing. I want to go to the summer league one summer, but I have kids and I have to dedicate the summers to them,

but to watch the Knicks play those games. And you get to see all the rookies and all the prospects play full games. You know, the vets aren't going there. They take their summers off. Yeah. If somebody went there and dedicated themselves to watching all the games and then was buying stock in the players early, and then they got an edge

and they made money from it, well, all that trade data would become super valuable to GMs and to people trying to understand the market and to the players who would be like, wow, people are betting on me because I played better defense or they saw me setting screens

or closing out or whatever it is. And so they serve a really good purpose in the world outside of just gambling. Now I want to have Vanit Bahra come on the show, and tell us if that's one of the, one of the plans for Mojo is to create that kind of analysis and insights out of this. People will have to have a theory. Right.

Yeah. Think about it. If you were buying stock in a rookie, you know, Steph Curry taken seventh in the draft, I believe, like somebody probably looked at that and said, you know what, this is the kid to bet on. And I'm buying his stock, right? And so who is that person? Then you could go back into the trades and say, who is the best person for doing that?

And if you're a young person and you could have a track record of picking stocks or which you can do very easily, that's like the classic way for you to get a job is to put your own $10,000 to work or whatever it is, build a mock portfolio and show you out you have great alpha. You beat the average return. Well, here you can do that and become a GM or work for a GM in sports. Yeah, totally. I love this kind of stuff. Moneyball. I know, you really do. Well, I just rewatched Moneyball, which by the way is an incredible film.

Brad Pitt. I mean, he's so attractive that people always talk about his looks. The dude is an incredible actor. I know. That one was once upon a time in Hollywood. I mean, that was, unbelievable. That was for me, it was like looking in a mirror when he's up there on the roof, fixing his antenna. Yeah, totally. That's you. I know. You worked hard for it. You know, you worked hard for half work hard for it. Maybe. We, I'm sorry to say, have an add-on to start up of the day, which I think is probably something we should keep doing, actually, the shutdown of the day. Yes. Because this is a part of the game.

In fact, I described it to somebody the other day. I was like, I'm so excited. I've got a founder in Founders University and one coming to the accelerator and maybe one and until, like, it's all happening. It's so great. And then I was like, I know, though, that this is the part where I'm just sending baby turtles toward the sea. Yeah, hoping they don't get hit by the sea, it goes or the shark.

And like, most of them are getting it picked out. So what's happening, of course, is that some turtles are. being picked off by goals. And today's shutdown of the day is actually surprising and extremely abrupt. It is, and close to my heart because the company going into our accelerator

is a competitor to this product, zero grocery. Oh, yes. Which is a grocery delivery startup that just raised, this is why this is so interesting, just raised a $12 million seed round last month. Oh, wait, I found this

when we were having our conversation about the company. that you wanted to have come to the accelerator. And I predicted exactly this. I think, like, this is going to be a massively hard execution place. It's a massively hard execution. Zero grocery was a plastic free, online delivery

service that operate in San Francisco and Los Angeles, two great markets to, you know, where people are super conscientious about these things. Yeah. And they made an announcement today. They had raised 12 million in Seed Round, has shut down. Today is Zero's last day,

with great regret, effective immunity, zero will be shutting its doors and stopping all further deliveries. How did this happen? Fundraising has always been the biggest battle we have faced. Unfortunately, it's the battle we've lost. Serving you and your families has been an absolute honor. You've welcomed zero into your homes and trusted us to feed you.

We put everything we had into something. Hmm. No other details about why it failed have happened. According to Pitchbook Zero also raised a $6.4 million seed round. The idea here, let me see if I can explain this. to you is the idea here was there are a group of people who would like to have less packaging and maybe buy things like you used to buy them at your grocery store, like when people would fill a bag for you and like they had the staples in barrels and stuff like that.

Am I correct? Yeah, or like the milkman, like it comes in glass, you know, and reusable and it's zero waste, hence the zero grocery concept. Listen, like, everybody's. clear-eyed about the logistics hurdles in delivery and then in sourcing goods that you package into these reusable containers, I still find it, you know, I mean, we're talking about a little over $18 million here to operate in two cities. That does still seem kind of abrupt. You should have only done one, number one, obviously, because you want to get the model perfect. Because if the model's not

perfect and let's say it's 50% inefficient, you're now 100% inefficient because you've doubled your inefficiency. So if you're losing money in the first iteration of a product, which is typically what happens, you don't want to lose a ton of money because then you run out of runway. So the fact that this, they announced the seed round last month, by the way. I don't know if that they raised it. So they may have announced the seed round last month. It could have been raised six months ago. Typically, that's what happened. So the money, they could have been burning a million or $2 million a month running this operation. Yeah. So what they should have been. have done is they should have done a pilot and they should have done just things that are staples

and that can be delivered wonderfully. In a way, the way Uber did only black cars, which were highly profitable, delightful, and just easy to beat the incumbent. So I would say for this, produce and staples like flour and sugar, coffee, I would love. It would be so delightful to get a box that came to my house with brown paper bags in it or containers like mason jars, like the mason jar is a standard, how beautiful would it be to get mason jars filled with raisins and cashews and flour and sugar of different sizes? And then you put them all in your cabinets for your pantry and it looks gorgeous. So I don't know if you've watched these YouTubers or TikTokers who obsess over perfect pantries, but I'm down with that way.

I'm down with perfect pantry. I'm so into perfect pantry life. Like it is is that would be the win. And then if you just did it like a subscription, like, hey, just every month give me a pound of sugar, pound of flour, whatever. And if I have a little extra fine. So I think with our company, and maybe there are some lessons here of how to run

a super cost effective, expensive, or properly priced beta with 100 people and really have the buy-in and then start going down market. So I would charge $100 to join. And with that, you get 100 Mason-Jour. right? So it's like kind of built in your onboarding. And it's $10 per delivery plus a tip. And we're going to come every week with your stuff.

And you're paying a little extra, but you're going to get so much benefit because we save you unpacking and we save you garbage. What do you think is the big idea here with these zero packaging or less 90% less packaging concepts? What's the big win for you? I mean, well, the big win is the is certainly the climate. The lack of waste, I think that's really valuable for consumers. I also think that it could translate, like, long term into cheaper groceries overall. Like 30% of the cost of consumer packaged goods is packaging. It's super expensive.

And so if you have this ability to enable hyper-local, you know, what sold me on this is one, everybody who doesn't want a beautiful pantry that doesn't come with a bunch of, like, crap. Because even if you get grocery delivery now, they'll still go to the store and bring you all of your produce. in those little plastic bags and you can't really stop that from happening. So this is sort of the convenience factor, minus the waste, and hopefully in a way that transforms consumer behavior. So my like thesis, really, my three funnels when I'm looking at these investments and yes, I've written this up and it's going to go somewhere soon, it's like I want to talk about

systems. Like are you somehow fundamentally transforming a system? Are you talking about gigatons? I don't want to hear about millions or God help a single digit done tons right giga tons and then finally behavior. Are you changing a consumer behavior? Because I really believe in the power of the consumer to be like, we don't want high fructose corn syrup anyway, no more. Know what happens? It goes away.

Like we don't want all this packaging and plastic and BS. Like you were talking about leaving all the stuff at the Apple store, which I totally did the other day. Oh, did you do that move? Uh-huh. How shots were there? I was like, here, just take this. Yeah. they were totally stumped, like completely stumped.

But they took it. Yeah. Like it was sort of on a pot. And then it was like, like they almost had to like go get someone to bring it away. They were just like, what do? They were like frozen. Like what do we do with garbage? It's like you created an apple.

Your problem, not mine. Take it away. Take all the pieces of the teeny little pieces of plastic. What Molly's referring to is the J-Cal move. I, you know, I go to the store. I buy a laptop. I buy, you know, a phone. I buy a watch.

And they bring it out or an iPad. Like literally, I did this when I bought my iPad, Pro with the magic keyboard. I literally sat there and I unboxed it in the store. I folded it. I took the cable, put it in my pocket. And I walked out with my, and I set it up while I was in the store. And I put this big stack of garbage.

And they were so offended by the amount of garbage. I said, maybe you should just hand me the goddamn iPad on the shelf. Imagine if you went to the Apple store and they had just in a thin sleeve, like a leather, folio or something, your iPad. And they had a stack of a hundred of them. And they just said, here you go. Take it off the shelf. I now, when I get produce, I don't know if you have these like pro fresh produce vegetable containers.

But I, again, back to like, you know, pantry life. Perfect pantry life. Hashtay pantry life. Have tag pantry life. They have these ones that you can put inside your, you know, draws in your refrigerator that hold your berries. And they have like a divider. So when the berries come and the fruit comes, I, like a dad. take all of the berries out of the plastic.

I wash them. And then I put a little paper towel down inside of these and I pour them in. Now my daughters, the little, you know, raptors they are because they're eating all of my money. I'm going to be broke soon. I've got to be on this podcast for another 30 years to pay for just the amount of fresh produce.

They say people go through blackberries like they're going through M&Ms and it costs a lot more. So they just literally my five-year-olds go in. They take the strawberry container out and they just literally, strawberries till they're gone or blueberries or blackberries or whatever. And so I don't want plastic blueberry container. I just make life easy. And like, if I order batteries, why is my four pack of batteries come with wrapped in plastic and wrapped in paper if Zero Grosser bought or the one we're working with?

If they bought, you know, a thousand AA batteries at a time and I order AA batteries, you could literally just put them into the box naked. I'd rather have naked stuff. I trust you that it's not the battery from your Walkman that's used. I trust you. You're a store. I get it. Toothpaste.

I don't need it to be. I tried to open a toothpaste container. I felt like it was like a Fort Knox. I had to go get like a knife because it was wrapped in plastic, then a paper, and then inside of it was wrapped in another layer of plastic, then a little bit of foil over the thing. I understand there's got to be some safety here. but there's also got to be something reasonable. Yeah.

I mean, absolutely. And we can make that happen. Like, we totally can. Paper bags. You and me as investors, but for crying out loud, like paper bags, like it's not everything has to be.

No, we can make it happen because here's the thing. All these movements start with a small group of people who are the tip of the same. So we have this founder who want, these founders who want to do it. We gave them the first hundred thousand. We're going to introduce them to a ton of people. If they run a reasonable, beta test and can get it to unit economic profitability for 100 people.

Then when you go to investors, you say, listen, this is, we're not going crazy here. We're going to find the top 2% of the market. We're going to over-service them for two years. And every year, we think we can get 1% of the market to adopt this, just like Tesla did with the roadster. The roadster, they made 1,500 of. Now they deliver 1,500 Model 3s in a day I'm getting, right? They're doing like almost a half million of those a year.

It's actually literally probably every day they deliver model S's and wise to the number of the total run of the first five years of the company in a day. So little things start with, you know, the thousand or the 2,000 true fans, shout out Kevin Kelly. So lots of lessons from zero grocery. Lots of lessons. And that's the plus side. And if you are an investor looking at a company like this, maybe when we're invested in, please know it can be done differently. But I'm sorry.

They apparently had a very, you know, like a really charismatic, cool founder, a lot of good investors. Oh, from zero grocery. Let's have them on the pot. I think what it would be really great for these postmortems is, you know, maybe three months or six months after to have the founder on and say, hey, would you be willing to talk about the lessons you learn. And we would consider that super graceful. And so if there's anybody out there who startup failed a year ago and they're on to their next startup where they became an investor or did something else, like we'd be. love to have you on. So email producers at this week in startups.com. All right. You actually have a notie named JJ who wrote 10, uh,

oh, 10 pod notes for us back in the spring and he's kind of stayed on me. And so I told him to maybe prepare some questions about career advice and we got him live. Oh, let's do it. Career advice. This is a free mentoring session from J-Cal to Molly Wood. Okay, Molly, where are you dialing in from? Molly, I am dialing in from Minneapolis, Minnesota. So nice to you. Apples, look at you. You got your blazer on. You got your shirt. With it on, I thought I had to throw it on as well.

I love it. Here we go. We're like, now you're like my detective partner in Brooklyn. We're going to go get a coffee with a little collua, some bally's in it, and then we'll go investigate this double homicide in Red Hook. So tell us your name one more time. Yeah, JJ Foster. J.J. Foster. What a great name. You're going places with that name. Yeah. J.J. Foster on line one. I like it already. And are you in college, high school? You look young. Yeah.

So kind of an interesting story there. The pod notes I did last spring were on the Power of Accelerator series. And funny enough, I actually two months ago dropped out of school to join On Dex accelerator. I'm going to associate there now. You're working there. Yes, full time. Yeah. You got a full-time job based in part you taking the accessibility.

Acelerary series of Angel. I don't know what season that was. It was season three, four or five. I was back in like 2020 or something. Okay, so it was probably a season three or four. You take the ten episodes. You wrote the notes up. We put them into Notion.

And writing the notes took you how long per episode? Listening to the episode takes an hour. And then writing the notes takes... About another hour. Yeah, it was about two per... That's it. Yeah, yeah, roughly. Two hours in.

I mean, I would put it on 2X speed and, you know... Perfect. Right up the notes while I was listening. But yeah. So then you apply for a job. at On Deck. Yeah, kind of. So a little backstory there as well.

At the University of Minnesota where I went to school, we have a student-run VC firm. So I was investing out of that, and the person who created that Lucas Bagno is at Village Global. So I stayed in contact with him. He notified me of, hey, on Dex, you know, raising a fund for ODX and got in touch. And yeah, here we are.

That's extraordinary. So, uh, what, when you look at those notes and the takeaway, do you take notes when you're normally doing a pod listening to a podcast or did you just do it for these? Because you really had a passion for it. And, uh, what role did that play maybe in, uh, your interview process? Because I would think if you're doing an interview and you knew all of the knowledge in those, you know, usually it runs about an hour. So let's just say it's 10, 12 hours worth of content. There must have been a decent amount of knowledge that you accumulated. So you go into that interview armed with all that. knowledge? Is that what happened? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. So, I would say the common thread throughout these Power of Accelerator, the series, was kind of the similarity to universities, which is kind of funny that I dropped out of one

to join an accelerator. But it's kind of like a university for companies. I certainly used that knowledge, but also, J-Cal, I've been listening to your podcast for, like, the Angel series, the Twist, all of that forever. How old are you, JJ? 21. 21.

And you've been listening to the pod for how long? Honestly, it's kind of crazy how far have come in about a year, year and a half. Yeah. So you've been listening

into it for the last year and a half. You get a job at On Deck. You got all this knowledge from listening to the pod. Would you say, like if you look back on your life, your greatest mentors, if you were to rank them,

who are your greatest mentors after your parents? I'm assuming maybe some teacher in high school, college, somebody, who are your top mentors in your life? Yeah. So there's... Throwing it out there.

Interesting, interesting point here. You can have mentors who you don't, like, know personally, right? Right. I would definitely put you up there, Jay Cowell. Okay, there we go. See, this is the power of podcasting, and this is what happens when you're a bit of a hustler. If you want to get into an industry, all you have to do is jump in.

Yeah. I think people are always waiting and what you need to do is be creating. You listen to 10 episodes of a podcast. You wrote notes. We put it on our website as fan notes because I thought this would be an interesting idea. If fans want to do this, I think we've had about 50 fans, write these notes. And here you are. Now you've got a career in the industry.

Now, of course, you went to school for it and you got some stuff there. Now that you're doing so well at the young age of 21, do you have questions for me about your future career and how to optimize that? Yeah, of course. Like, what do I do now, right? I finally broke in to VC. That's such a common term these days. Yeah.

But, like, now how do I go from zero to one to one to ten, right? Like in the industry, do you have any tips there, I guess? Yeah, let me ask you. Like, just like, so the pods, the pod notes, I actually used that and did the same thing for Harry Stebbings 20VC podcast. Oh, great. Just sent it to him randomly. and over another six months of badgering him got him on a phone call as well. He's been an awesome person to just talk through and so vulnerable.

I think that's a power you and him have. You're real. Well, not that vulnerable, but I am real. He's a mess. He's a mess. He's a joke. He wears it on his sleeve and I think it's quite charming, actually. What I would say is, think about at its, so one thing I want to point out to people who are listening to this,

if you're creating stuff, you have learned something inherently in your networking ability, which is if you show interest in other people, people will be interested in you. So because you wrote notes about people's podcasts, they have no choice. But when you say, hey, I wrote these notes up about your pod, though you might be interested in them if you want to use them for anything. You've tapped into two phenomenon of human psychology. One is you showed interest in other people so that they'll show interest in you. And then reciprocity, you did something for me writing these notes.

I'm of course flattered and thankful. I'm flattered that you listen to the show and I'm thankful that you took the time to do this because we put them on the website and share them with other people they get value from it. Those two things will take you far in life. If you show interest in what other people are doing

and you help other people without any expectation of reward, you create a massive amount of reciprocity. So how does that work in what we do in investing? Well, this is where the term, how can I be helpful, you know, has become such a cliche. If you give a founder a great piece of information

or insight where you let them know, hey, there's a pothole around this turn. Be careful when you take this turn or, hey, maybe you should talk to this person. They've worked in that vertical before. Or did you know about this company that went out of business that tried to do something similar to what you're doing? All of that could be accretive to their success. So being of service to other people and helping other people is the path to success in what we do in Ventureland and investing. And then what is investing at its core is what you have to ask yourself. So I'll ask you this question. At its core, what do we do when we invest in companies? You're taking a bet on a person. I mean, at the early stage here. Correct. You're making a bet. Making a bet is good. So you're making a bet. Okay. And if you're making a bet,

you got the right answer. You're selecting a winner. Or you're selecting what you think is a winner and you're trying to increase their chances of winning by giving them capital and then being in align with them. So what we do is we anoint people and we pick winners. So then you have to ask yourself at the company you're at, are you doing that behavior? Or are you supporting somebody who's doing that behavior? Both of them are valid?

And are you making sure that you get credit for that work? So how do you get credit for the work? Well, the way you get credit for the work is if you're doing meetings, like my associates do 15 meetings a week, if they, and we record them, we ask for permission, hey, can we record the Zoom?

now imagine you find the next Robin Hood Uber Com and you were the first person at your firm to interview them. Now you have that interview and you have your notes from it and nobody can take it away from you ever. Now, if the company invest in it, when I had Doug Leone on, he talked about the different people at Sequoia who actually found the great companies they invested in

and who were the first point of contact. Now, did they get sold credit for that? No, the brand of launch or this weekend startups or the syndicate may have brought them in, but you made sure you shepherded them, from when they applied for on deck or somebody applied for our accelerator to the point in which we wound up getting on the cap table. And that is super valid.

You don't get 100% credit for it, but you should get some credit for it. Now, if you found them at a demo day that you went to on a weekend, great. And so it really is how many startups can you write coverage of? How many can you meet? How many Zooms can you record? Keep them in your hard drive and be able to tell your bosses, hey, listen, I met with in the first quarter, 150 companies in 16 weeks. I did 10 a week.

And this quarter, I'm trying to get to 12, you know, whatever. I'm going to up it to 15 a week. And I'll do 180. And by the way, of the 180, these are the 10 that I was most enthusiastic of. These five actually got Series A's and we miss those. So you're basically betting on yourself and doing your own money ball and moneyball yourself. And I never did that for myself. Other people were doing it with my track record like other LPs and other people were watching

me do it, but I do it now. I like to see with my team. who finds the good nuggets. And so just essentialism, if you want to be an investor, it's about finding great companies and placing bets. So don't forget that. And then you got to get credit for it. And you're a person who likes to write,

and you're a good writer. Being able to write and communicate well is more important than anything in life. Like literally, your ability to communicate, your ability to write, to speak, converse, to network, trumps everything. Just to be clear, it trumps everything. You could be a complete, utter moral.

on. But if you had the ability, and I'm not describing myself here, but let's face it, I'm not writing the code or building the hardware or building rocket ships over here. I'm talking my way into deals. I am communicating to people and networking with people to get my name and get a slice of that cap table. And that's really what it's about. And you're a great communicator. So JJ, you're going to do fantastic. And the job is going okay on on deck? Is it like an internship or it's a full-time gig? Yeah, yeah, full time. So I'm associate for the ODX team. On that you were speaking to there,

I remember back in a, I'm a huge acquired fan and you went on their pod back in 2020 and talked about. Yeah, yeah. Always picking up the tab. I was wondering if you could maybe speak to that. And like, I'm right, I'm living in Minneapolis. Most of my interactions people are online at this point.

How does that relate? Leave. You got to leave Minneapolis. As quick as possible. Like, you just have to run. to Austin, L.A., Miami, New York, anywhere but like a third or fourth tier city where there's no tech people. So get the hell out of Dodge. Get the smallest apartment you can at the lowest cost basis. And go to a town where there's going to be a ton of collisions. A ton of collisions will happen for you most in the valley.

And then after that, you could pick L.A., New York, Miami, or Austin equally. but I would give you a counter indicator. People are not coming here, but the most powerful people are still here. So there would be an argument for you to literally get a studio apartment in Redwood City or somewhere in Palo Alto and just go hang out in Palo Alto every day

and have lunch there and just listen to conversations and meet people. And then in terms of picking up the tab, you just got to find a place where you can order a bunch of appetizers family style and order drinks like in the pitcher. So that's like Sangria, pictures of beer,

pizza, Mexican food was always one of my staples because I love Mexican food. And you do those and you just order for the table. Sushi, when you get a little bit more cheddar, you can do that too,

but you invite two founders who you met and two other associates and now you got five people at dinner. If it wants to be 40 bucks a person, it's $200 going to kill you? Probably not. Pick up the tab. You give your credit card as you go in

that comes and now you're baller. Like, who was JJ? JJ picked up the tab? Everybody's on the way to the car. So, Joe, what about? Oh, did the bill ever come? No, JJ got it. That's what you want to be.

Now, wait, people go to, like, oh, my God, Jake Al picked up the tab, you know, like, it's a, it's a BFD. It'll make you baller, but you got to get the hell out of. What are you, Minnesota, you said? Yeah, yeah, yeah, Minnesota. Yeah, no, no diss to Minnesota, but there's nothing going on there. You got to get the hell out of there quickly. I meet Wallywood, by the way.

This is JJ. She still think so. Hi, Jay, Jay. Hi, Ma. I really love the suit jacket. Well done. Yeah, I had to throw it on. I had to throw it on.

Look, Dickhouse already raising everybody's game. Here we go. Really, you still think even in the remote universe that we live in now? I mean, we had a first time by manager on. It didn't matter for the last two years. It certainly didn't matter. He raised $10 million on Twitter. JJ wants every advantage possible.

Well, yeah, okay, then. So, the way I look at it is... If it's full court hustle, you do have to go to the town. He wants to go full court. He wants to do a full court press. He wants to skip the... some steps. If you want to skip some steps, I mean, if you're hanging out in Palo Alto and San Hill Road at Stanford, you're going to make a lot of collisions, man. I was, I was hanging out

the Stanford Mall this weekend. I did like five selfies, you know, I'm walking through the campus and went to like one of their gardens there. They have this beautiful cactus garden I went to. And, you know, I appreciate the botanical arts as everybody knows. And yeah, I'm just getting stopped constantly talking to people. Every conversation is about technology. And it's probably similar in Austin and Miami. But I do think over the last two years, it didn't matter because nobody could go out. But I think it's going to be the opposite now. I think it's going to matter more.

Yeah. Because people are going to be still doing the remote. Most people will keep doing the remote thing. And then a few people are going to network. What if you ran into me one day and I offered you a job? You know, like this is a distinct possibility. And now you've proven yourself, oh, I know J-Cal, I know 20 Minow VC, I know the acquired guys. I know Molly Wood.

I worked out on deck. I'm considering my options. I mean, you're 21 and you're considering your options. Jesus. But you know what? You learned the really great lesson in life early on. Reciprocation effect, showing interest in other people, which was codified in how to make friends and influence people, a seminal networking book.

If you're interested in other people, they will be interested in you. And then number three, you are creating, not waiting. and Rachel, who works for me and Justin, both had their own pods before they worked for me. And I told Rachel, we've done like six or seven episodes. It's like a solid seven. They're like a 6.5 podcaster.

Come work for me. I'll teach you how to be eight and a half. And now she does every Friday, something that a large group of people are absolutely, you know, anticipate listening to, which is Rachel reporting's okay, boomer segment. You may have heard of it on Friday. She's kind of building her own little brand here.

And she's in 8.5. I'll give her 7.5, 8.5 now. She's moving up. Taking a little mentorship for Molly and it's going on. All right. Great job. JJ, can't wait to meet you. Get the hell out of Minnesota.

Absolutely. I will hit you up, J. Cowell, if I, if I stop by. Yeah. Okay. Thanks for coming. I appreciate you badgering me through that whole thing. It was good. He was persistent.

Yeah. If anybody does 10, I'll have coffee with them or talk to him during the live stream. So I'm going to put the offer out there. Anybody writes 10 solid. pod notes. You just pick 10 episodes. You go to the, how do they do it?

Justin, go to the Notion page. Yeah, just email producers at this week and startups first and we'll get you all set up. I got a nice instruction email I can reply to with. So there you go. You want to have a quick 10 minute segment on the program or, you know, Me for Coffee or whatever. And you want to get close to the, you know, and get more involved, write 10 show notes. Got to get in the room, right, Jason? Got to get in the room.

the room where it happens, right? And it's a virtual room now. You just made your first appearance on this week and start. Appreciate it. Great job, JJ. Take care, Jay Day Day. 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 of over 9,000 accredited investor. at the syndicate.com. Producer Justin here,

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