This Week in Startups - Facebook funding anti-TikTok lobbyists with Taylor Lorenz + SEC SPAC crackdown, Fast vs. Bolt | E1422

Episode Date: March 30, 2022

First up, Taylor Lorenz joins to talk about her newest scoop for the Washington Post: Facebook hired a GOP firm to trash TikTok (2:18)! Then, we discuss the SEC considering cracking down on SPACs (39:40), lastly we cover Fast, a 500-person one-click checkout startup, reportedly generating less than $1M in revenue (1:01:14).  Read Taylor's Article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/ Taylor Lorenz’s book: www.goodreads.com/book/show/58818667-extremely-online FOLLOW Taylor: https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood (00:00) Jason and Molly intro the show (02:18) Taylor Lorenz from the Washington Post on Facebook using Targeted Victory (11:27) Coda - The All-in-one doc for teams, get a $1,000 credit at https://coda.io/twist (12:41) Separating the legitimate concerns from fake stories (21:03) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (22:21) Measuring the likelihood of TikTok being banned in the U.S. (31:20) Embroker - Get an extra 10% off insurance for your business at https://Embroker.com/twist (32:37) Should journalists be encouraged to build their own brands? (39:40) SEC meeting TODAY (3/30/22) to discuss crackdown on SPACs, specifically allowing investors to SUE over “embellished projections” (1:01:14) Bolt’s one-click checkout competitor “Fast” having trouble raising $100M at a $1B valuation, according to The Information

Okay, everybody, we have a huge, huge, huge show for today. Lots of fascinating news and special guests. Special guest, the queen of TikTok, Taylor Lorenz, to talk about her newest scoop for the Washington Post, because they just keep coming. Jason calls them the Tay bomb. I think we can all agree. That's what they are.

In this case, Facebook hired a GOP public relations firm to trash TikTok. I love that we don't call the meta. We're just going to stick with Facebook. We're not buying what you're selling. It's still Facebook. It still loathsome. And the end. SEC and additional news is considering cracking down on SPACs a little bit. And we talk about

how you should contextualize making bets on risky companies and what kind of disclosures perhaps would help the SPAC space become a little more respected and maybe a little more disclosure that could help it with, let's face it, it's been a rough ride for the last year for SPACs. And speaking of making big bets, we're going to talk about fast, a one-click checkout startup that Seems to be going slow. Oh, great pun. The producers really get me. They get me.

And you know this is part of the whole brouhaha with Ryan Bresla and all these VCs going back and forth. And so once again, we're being pulled into this. Dax are being leaked. Tea is being spilled. Tea is being spilled. The beef is being brazed. It's got to be a great show.

Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Coda. Coda is the all-in-one dock for team. If you've got a stack of niche workflow tools, or if you're buried in docs and spreadsheets, Cota is the dock that brings it all together. Startups can get a $1,000 credit at coda.io slash twist. Lemon.io. Need to speed up your product development without draining your budget?

Hire vetted engineers from Europe at lemon.io. Go to lemon.io slash twist to get 15% off for the first four weeks. and Embroker's startup insurance program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Save up to 20% off of traditional insurance today at imbroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist. The queen has arrived. Surprise! The queen has arrived in her third or fourth appearance here on this week in startups.

Taylor Lorenz is here. And I think is Drew here too? I don't know if we have both, but they dropped a huge story today. And so maybe you can queue up the story, Molly, while we get the model in. Logan Taylor's video up. Yeah, bombshell story from the queen,

Taylor Lorenz. A Tay bomb, as Jason's calling it. If you will, a Tay bomb. And co-authored by Drew Harwell, a story noting that Facebook, noting for the first time ever in previously unseen emails, Facebook paid a GOP public relations firm to trash TikTok,

to literally start seeding stories across the country, placing op-eds and letters to the editor and major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that, as it turns out, actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor. All right. And with us,

the queen of the Tabebaum, Tay Mo is here. Hi. Congratulations. You've been working at the Washington Post for 17 seconds. And has lobbed 17 Tay bombs, one for every second. She had two big dunks in the first month, two huge drops. And this is after a little bit of a mini brouhaha where some folks were like,

maybe don't shine so bright. So that's got to feel good that you come in and drop some big stories. How did you find out about this? What was the source and the origin of this? Because now I think, not literally who was the source. What's that? I said not literally who was the source.

Well, yeah, don't want out the source. But how did you come to this story? Because I'm assuming now that you're so high profile and you've built a brand for yourself, which we can talk about the sort of contentiousness in media with the old guard saying, don't build a brand. The Washington Post is a brand. I think you've become kind of the nexus, the super router, of breaking social media stories.

So maybe you could unpack that. Yeah, definitely. Well, this story I actually started to look into months ago because I noticed a lot of these kind of dubious TikTok trends stories blowing up in local news. I get Google alerts for TikTok and they kind of dominate the Google alerts. I spent a lot of time on TikTok and I was like, none of these trends are real, like the slap picture thing.

And it actually was leading to certain school districts to shut down school for the day. So kids are missing education because parents are terrified of these, you know, viral TikTok trends that there's really no evidence exists. So I started looking into it and kind of, looking into local news, I started to, yeah, sort of investigate the origins of some of this stuff. And I also started to notice, you know, these op-eds that were all using really similar language, like the letters to the editor in different regional papers. You could post the, you know, sentences into Google, and you would see multiple versions of that

in totally separate districts around the country. So what's an example of the trend? You mentioned these trends that were faux trends. And you can spot them because, listen. You're on TikTok, you understand how the mechanics work. If it's a trend, it's a trend. It goes big, correct? Yeah, and if you wouldn't mind, like, unpack that specific trend that you're talking about

because I got an email from my school about that, you know, the credible thread on TikTok thing. And that's a really beautiful example of one of these things that was apparently completely planted. Yeah, they're totally bogus. So, you know, I'll use the slap of teacher one as an example. So what happened actually was somebody posted this. insane list of like fake TikTok trends to a parents' Facebook group. It went viral actually on Facebook because local police officers started to warn it. They started to send out these emails to parents like, hey, be careful. There's this trend where teenagers are slapping their

teachers and recording it. It's viral on TikTok. That's not a thing. It's just not. And there's been a few things like that. I mean, it reminds me a lot of the Todd Pod challenge, if you guys remember that. Of course. A few of times when YouTube was for all of these trends. But it's sort of similarly, it's this panic. And, you know, I think it's a lot of things like parents not really knowing what's happening on TikTok. So they're kind of like, well, better be cautious, better keep our kids home.

It's fear of new technology is at the root of all of this, I think. And then obviously Facebook stoking those fears, you know, taking this dubious trend story in one market and trying to replicate it across other markets to generate outrage. So you see these local news stories. You do the gumshoe and you figure out, hey, there's similar language here, and it's not a trend. So your spidey sense is going up. How do you make the connection that meta is stroking the fire here? Well, I basically just started asking around and then sort of, you know, I have a lot of sources.

I cover TikTok. I had actually posted a Twitter thread back in January when Blumenthal came out against some TikTok trend that was not a TikTok trend. And I was like, this is crazy. where is all this stuff coming from? And I kind of documented Blumenfall's comments and kind of how wrong he was. And then people started reaching out to me. And I sort of got a hold of this stuff.

And then I found out about the targeted victory connection and investigated and got a hold of all the emails. Yeah. So tell us about targeted victory and this firm and why it's relevant that this firm mostly does work for the GOP, if it's relevant. Yeah. No, it's super relevant. I mean, targeted victory has actually worked with Facebook for a,

while. So they actually helped orchestrate that meeting between a bunch of conservative people and Mark Zuckerberg, you know, when they were saying that we were being silenced a couple years ago. But their relationship has deepened, specifically since the TikTok threat of the TikTok ban. I think it's really relevant that they're using this Republican firm, one, because they're trying to engage in a lot of tactics and work to court Republican lawmakers who have wanted to be really tough on China or wanted to be really tough on sort of things protecting the children, right? A lot of the messaging that you see

in this stuff against TikTok is kind of dog whistling to the ideology that really resonates with Republicans, like saving the children, right? Child predators are out there and TikTok is dangerous. We need to protect the children or anti-China stuff. Now, TikTok

deserves criticism, right? We should investigate the relationship between bite dance and China. That's a very worthy investigation, but they're using this really inflammatory language and seeding these upeds that kind of stoke fears that as of yet are unfounded. You know, one of the interesting questions is, and I've had this debate with David Sachs on Allend Pod, and actually, teller, you and I have debated over the years, like, is TikTok a front for the Chinese government? I take a very cynical position of dictators. I think you were

like, hey, show me the evidence the last time we talked about it, which might have been like two years ago. Well, now we have the evidence. The Chinese government has shut down all the companies there, So it's kind of leaning towards like maybe my cynicism was directionally correct. Like Chinese government does have the keys to the kingdom. They did pass legislation that all of the data, you know, they need to have access to it. And they shut down a bunch of education companies. Putting that aside, I'm trying to figure out Zuckerberg's politics because he made a bunch of donations to left wing people. He threw Trump off the platform.

But Peter Thiel's his mentor. And he's backing this. kind of he's engaging targeted victory, which is the most cynical kind of approach I think you could take. Is he playing both sides? Is he a secret Republican? Because that's the thing I need to find out. I know. And by the way, I'm cynical about all of this stuff too.

I mean, as a reporter, I just as a reporter too, it's like you kind of have to wait for the receipts. And that's like this are so good because you have the receipts. With Zuckerberg, I think she honestly is just will do anything that's in the best. interest of his company. I think he will align himself with really dark people. I think he's just out for himself as a true you know, look, he's going to put the bad.

Late stage capitalists. Say it. He's a late stage capitalist. I was going to go mercenary, but okay. Mercenary, whatever. I mean, he does not care which side. He wants both sides on the platform. And when he saw the Republicans were going to leave because they felt like he was maybe putting the thumb on one scale, he's like, okay, let's put the thumb on the other scale. Let's get

Ben Shapiro in here. Let's get Alex Jones in here or whatever. And I think both of these platforms are a bit dangerous if unregulated. So when you look at it now, and as your knowledge of this continues to evolve, let me just ask you bluntly, putting aside this political issue, because it shows us Zuckerberg's true stripes, you get his receipts, do not trust this person. He's a marauder. He does not care about people. He cares about women. winning, he should be regulated. I think it's becoming very clear. And you don't have to be a cynic.

You can just look at the receipts like you're saying. Okay, efficiency is one of the main components in startup success. We all know that. And that's what Coda is all about. Coda is the all-in-one doc for teams. Your text and tables live together in the same documents, which helps any team collaborate more efficiently. They've got thousands of templates to work with,

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Go to coda.io slash twist to get a $1,000 credit right now. Coda.io, CodA.i-o slash twist to get that $1,000 credit. But now let's go back to TikTok. Would it not be much better for America, independent of the dirty tactics here, if it was not a Chinese company with all this data and an algorithm programming our children

because TikTok is absurdly influential on kids' brains. I mean, maybe you could expand on exactly how much impact TikTok has had on young people. Yeah, I mean, I think that we should absolutely question TikTok. And I think, I mean, part of the reason I like doing these stories is because there's really, legitimate concerns around TikTok, specifically around the algorithm and the way things snowball

and how it's sort of basically built for like mob justice and a level of mob attack that like could not be facilitated even on Facebook. It's just that when we look at these like local fake viral stories, that almost distracts from the real danger of it. And so that's what I think is important to talk about. Like you mentioned, Jason, TikTok also just has a level of cultural relevance that Facebook doesn't have as the ability to really shape young people's views on things. It has a huge misinformation problem. I mean, people, there is no, like, media literacy on TikTok at all. Like, you see these with all of these sex trafficking panics, like the Wayfair scandal,

you know, where people thought the Wayfair was selling children. People just gobbled that up on TikTok with zero skepticism. And unlike Twitter and other social platforms where there's journalists or, you know, people that can kind of moderate that conversation and backcheck, TikTok is like Lord of the Flies. And so I think it's terrifying, right, to think about that kind of impact and the way that we're seeing it manifests in the real world. I always give the example of Adrian's kickback. Do you guys remember that last year? No, I remember West Elm guy.

Also another good example, although not a physical world. So Adrian's kickback was this thing where this kid's 15 year old, this 15 year old's birthday party went viral. And thousands of kids ended up showing up at Honey TV. Oh, I do remember this. Yes, right. That is something where, okay, it's a kid's birthday party, right? But think about something like that with, for instance, storming the capital, right? Totally.

Just the ability to mobilize that many people and reach that many people and encourage them to act, it's just so much stronger on TikTok than it ever is on Facebook. And I think we're going to see that play out in dangerous ways. Why is it so much easier on TikTok? I think some people don't understand how TikTok works as the default. So maybe you could just educate people on the default. of lack of feedback, right? You watch this thing, there's no comments, like break down exactly why it is so much easier to sort of spread something unchallenged. Yeah, well, so TikTok's primary

mode of consumption is not through a following feed. Every American social network, you as a user have to subscribe to someone's content to see it or it's reshared by someone you follow, right, like a Twitter retweet. TikTok breaks all of that. It is just an algorithmically programmed feed that distributes content to you. You don't have to follow a single person on the app. So things can break out and reach millions within minutes because nobody has to opt into that content. So when that algorithm goes off the rails and starts feeding sort of dangerous things,

it can just spread a lot quicker. And Molly, I forgot we just asked. Oh, that's okay. I actually have a follow up related to this whole idea, though, which is, well, okay, what I actually was saying was you mentioned that like on Twitter and Facebook, there may be some moderation, but there's also sort of pure moderation. Like, TikTok has comments, but no one ever looks at them, right? Like, no one ever sees them.

And so if somebody's in the comments being like, actually, here's the truth. You know, everything in your video is a lie. Like, I never see that. I just watch my cute husky videos and I never see if they have been fact checked. Absolutely. I mean, a lot of people don't engage with the comments. A lot of young people do engage with comments, but the comments are also algorithmically ranked. And no one is going to upvote a lot of stuff that calls stuff false.

I mean, people don't. There's such a willingness to believe stuff on TikTok. It's worse than boomers on Facebook. I swear to God. Like, I've never seen a platform with so, such different for a truth. And there's no way to moderate yourself out of that. There's no way that TikTok can moderate content at scale. We need media literacy.

Like, we need people to. Do you think it's because of the face? I mean, literally like the fact that you're watching someone on video and they're, because they are engaging enough to show up in the algorithm, that means they're probably charismatic. They might look good. They've got a good production value. Like is I can just, if I read something on Facebook or Twitter and all the nuance is lost and all the humanity is lost,

like it just can go by me or I can be like this doesn't sound right. But when you're watching like a good looking person sincerely tell you something and they put some work into it, like I wonder if there's something about the medium that makes it more compelling in that way. 100%. A hundred percent. And a lot of times it's like you're pure, right? Another young person or another person of your identity.

like promoting this misinformation or wrong info or whatever. It's a much more visceral and personalized platform and people have parisocial bonds, right? It's a platform that's run by influencers. And we know that people are more likely to trust news that they get from a content creator or personality versus a nameless media brand. It's much more persuasive video than text. You know, an image is more persuasive than text and a video is more persuasive than an image and then an influencer is more persuasive than an average person.

So you put all this together. You know, the truth is, we have a foreign government that is a dictatorship and a communist country that now has a tool and a plug directly into the youth of America that is completely not able to discern truth anymore. And it's not their fault. It's the nature of these platforms. they could literally program our country. And if you think about what an amazing job,

the Russians do at disinformation, misinformation with the KGB, if we're not allowed to have our social networks inside of China, I think it's a no-brainer to ban TikTok here and then let another American company, you know, pick up the mantle, which is what would happen.

Well, if we did ban it. Now you sound like Zach, though. Can we go back to the meta part of a little bit, which is like, what you're saying is true. Yes. And also Facebook is programming the shit out of, us and given Facebook's close connections to, for example, you know, primarily GOP public relations

firms or Peter Thiel, like I think we should be probably equally, which, you know, they all have, anyway, like, I'm not saying the Russian propaganda. I'm just saying I think we should be equally skeptical of both of them actually. Like somehow this Facebook scandal story is turned into a bad TikTok story, but like, whoa, whoa, whoa, everybody's playing the same game here. You're saying meta is no. If you ban. If you banned. TikTok, Facebook gets the business. We're actually handing it to Facebook. What do you think?

I'm not sure that I would rather suck than... What's the way out? Triller? China. Which is a confusing thing to say. No, I'm with you, Molly. There's no good guy here. These are both really dangerous,

large, multi-billion dollar tech conglomerates in different ways. And I don't think Facebook is great at sort of mitigating this type of harm either. If it was banned, who would pick up the mantle no likely would Triller be, where would all the creators go if you, because I think it's inevitable,

I'd be totally honest, I think it's inevitable. No. Okay. I think it's inevitable. TikTok gets banned because it's just too much of a risk factor in the United States to have everybody on a social network controlled by a communist country.

Yeah, and I don't know. I mean, this is the problem too, is the app is so sophisticated and it's such a better product. And they've sort of forced all of these other companies to get put on notice, like the way that TikTok mints content creators is something that, YouTube could never do, right?

So I don't know. You know, if it gets banned, who knows? I think that Facebook or YouTube would pick up the mantle. YouTube, yeah. And they're not, you know, great at this stuff either. So we're in a pickle. I also, I mean, I think that in general, the only way that we're going to stop a lot of this harmful stuff is by educating people

and teaching young people media literacy. Because there's no way to like kind of squash all these platforms or that these platforms can moderate stuff at scale. It's just not we need people to be more skeptical and learn critical thinking. When you're scaling your startup quickly, hiring engineers can slow you down like nothing else. We all know that. Well, here's some good news for you. Lemon.io will find you the perfect candidate within, wait for it, 48 hours, I kid you not.

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to run your projects faster, I want you to go to lemon.io slash twist. Again, lemon.com. And you're going to receive a 15% discount for the first four weeks of work with the developer. What a great deal. I don't see a situation in which TikTok actually gets banned. I think there would be so many,

like then do you pull every movie out of China? Do you pull all the NBA out? Like the kind of geopolitical relations of the like that would, I just don't see that happening. The economic ties between the two countries are too strong given everything else. However, I think that Taylor gets to the really central point, which is that the platform is not necessarily. The platform alone is not the problem because social media will continue to exist

and will continue to be great at manipulating people. And so the question is, How do we train people not to be manipulated so easily? And can we? Like, we might not be able to. It's sort of the way our brains work. We're programmable. Yeah, I don't have the answer.

I think it's really hard to because there's just not been a lot of innovation in the social space in America. You know what I mean? We were in this sort of like winter. And now you see people talking about Web 3 and crypto. I mean, I don't think any of that's going to be a better system either. So I don't know. Taylor, if you were in charge, which eventually you're probably going to be at this pace,

and you could press the button, would you ban China from having TikTok here? That's option one. Number two, would you ban them from having a default to the algorithm? Or number three, some other solution? I would try to find some other solution only because I don't want to be quoted as saying Taylor Lorenz wants to ban TikTok. Got it.

Okay. So what you're saying is maybe you feel like you would. It's dangerous and harmful in a lot of ways. And my goal with reporting stories like this is to focus, like, help people really understand that stuff. Like the West. What about an age limit? An age limit.

I mean, I wish there was like an age limit where people could start to recognize propaganda. I don't. I think. Yeah. This is a curriculum problem, right? Like, you, I don't, like, gun to my head, I couldn't tell you which platform I think is more dangerous, meta and Facebook or TikTok. But what I can tell you is misinformation and propaganda and disinformation are the most dangerous.

And I would love for my kid to be learning that in school. I think we should, number one, force them to disclose the algorithm. So when you are, when you open your thing up, it should say, here is how we are waiting your behavior here. Number one, we think you like Bulldogs. Number two, we think you like, you know, Lizzo. Number three, we think you like this. And therefore, we showed you this because of these reasons and signals. Click here to edit or turn off the algorithm.

And it has to present you with that. For every hour you're on the service, it presents you your algorithm explanation. And then Twitter should have to do the same, and Facebook should have to. All algorithms should be presented every X number of. hours of utilization with clear way to opt out of the algorithm or to tweak your own algorithm.

And if you don't do that, then you can't operate a social network here. I like the idea of more transparency. I doubt that any tech company would ever get on board with that, but I do think... Well, that's why I think regulators would have to force it, right? Yeah. There's a lot, like, you can download and request your data and stuff, but

nobody ever does that. And I think you're right. Until there's like this consumer-facing product and awareness, people just don't think. But even with awareness, people just want to believe, you know, we just see this over and over again. People just want to see information that confirms their beliefs. They want to see stuff that plays into their preconceived notions and they don't want to be confronted with stuff that doesn't. And that's, it's hard when you're running these platforms to, you know, that are optimized for engagement to get people out of those bubbles.

Yeah. I don't want to take us all the way down a nightmare rabbit hole. But you can't help but notice how the narrative that this PR firm has been pushing dovetails so well with kind of the QAnon like protect the children thing. So, Molly, so people who don't know Q&ONON. Right. So people who are not familiar and my God, I hope you are because the Q&ONOND dog whistles are far, far and wide, including in Supreme Court judge questioning. But Q&ONN is this cult effectively that states and Taylor can probably say this better than I can.

but in which, you know, adherents believe that like Donald Trump is the one true king and president. All Democrats and most celebrities are satanic cultists who maybe eat children, but certainly traffic them that they're all pedophiles and that there will be this great storm in which they're all rounded up and killed and Donald Trump is restored as president. And it was a subreddit where it started, right? Like, then they had been trying to reverse engineer the writing style. Yeah, I started. It was actually started at 8chan.

I mean, I've been sucked up in that. If you Google me, you'll think that I'm a child predator. That's a constant attack against the media. And Molly, I mean, that's what struck me so much in reading, you know, the documents that I got hold of that outlined the strategy from targeted victory. It is 100% feeding into those narratives because those narratives really well with conservative-leaning parents, friends in general, right? It goes back to those satanic panic types of stuff.

It's always worked, right? Like, whenever you want to put into place a law that, like, takes away somebody's rights, you say that you're doing it to protect the children. Like you do. That's what Fasta and Sesta were about. But drawing those parallels, I think, can't be, it can't be overstated how, how deliberate that is to rile up a certain segment of the country that's extremely active and kind of scary. Yeah. You guys might not remember this, but in the 80s, we used to play something called Dungeons and Dragons.

and there was a Dungeons and Dragons. It was a Red Music. Yeah, back in the day where they said it was a satanic game where you would play against the devil and dragons. I mean, it was Lord of the Rings, basically, the Crib token. And that people were becoming satanic worshipping, kids were becoming Satanic worshipping maniacs because they put in Dungeons and Dragons that were murdering each other in rituals or something.

None of it was true, but it made for great television. Yeah, I mean, like, that's terrifying to think of what that would, you know, like how those messages would be spun today. I think because of the internet just allows this stuff to spread 10 times further. The thing that's so pernicious about the story you broke today. So again, congratulations on that. Seriously, great scope. Great job. Undeniable talent, just breaking story after story.

The really pernicious thing about this for me is Facebook is using something that I think is a genuine concern. to serve their needs. And this is where the devil mixes lies with truth. It's one of the really hard things for people to do is parse this. Facebook has bad nefarious intent. And I think China does too. And they've now become bedfellows. And that's where, you know, I think journalism,

especially the type you practice, which is on the ground investigative, is super valuable for society. I know you get a lot of pushback and blowback on Twitter from time to time. and we can debate things. But the fact that you keep putting up these kind of numbers and stories is really impressive. You know, just Molly and I both as journalists, commentators, whatever, you know, respect to you. And to your coworkers, we're giving you a hard time before you even got there.

Oh, my, that's fine. I mean, was that, what was that about? Was that like a real thing? Jason's like, and now for the tea. No, I just like a little tea, like a sip. I've been my whole career. I mean, first of all, I don't. mind starting shit on Twitter at all

is Twitter. No doubt. Twitter's to what is Twitter for? Like, I don't mind if people want to come from me on Twitter. Like, I'll happily reply. You know what I mean? I don't know how long you followed my work. But like, I've been on this beat for 10 years. People... I loved you at the Atlantic so much.

Daily, Bees before that. And I mean, and Mike before that, but people, people dismiss this beat. I write about things that I get it. It's young people things. I'm not a real tech reporter. You know, for the whole first part of the 2010, it was like, oh, Taylor you're covering content creators, that's not really tech reporting. Meanwhile, now all these DCs have like creator economy in their bio. It's a slow march towards like understanding this stuff.

And I think that we just need to take it seriously and do the real reporting on it so that people can really understand these platforms and the implications of them. I think DC Media hasn't traditionally understood that. That's how we got Trump, you know? I think that's, it's failing to understand the mechanisms of online influence leads to a certain blindness. about culture and the world. So I don't, you know, I don't care. All right. I want to quickly explain to you one crucial type of insurance that every startup needs to have and you need to know about it. It's called cyber insurance. And obviously this covers hacks, which are happening constantly. You may not hear about them all the time because

people like to keep them quiet and resolve them well. In these crazy times, you need to be protected and you need to have cyber insurance. If you don't have business insurance, let's face it. You failed one of the first steps of being a proper CEO and founder, especially of a company backed by investors. So, startups should look no further than our friends over at Embroker. They have technology to save you time and money. Their prices are up to 20% lower and they'll give you better coverage than the incumbents. You go from sign up to quote and purchase in just 10 minutes. And when you work with Embroker instead of those slow incumbents, you're not dealing with these large lumbering corporations. Nope. Your signup takes days, not weeks, and the process is

completely transparent. There's no opaque pricing. There's no wasted time. It's just easy, peasy lemon squeezy. So to instantly buy custom built insurance for your startup, go to imbroker.com slash twist. And while you're there, you're going to get an extra 10% off by using the offer code twist, E-M-B-R-O-K-E-R dot com slash twist, and get that extra 10% off by using the offer code twist and not let them know you, listen to them on the show. All right, great job in broker. But it's all good. Also, Josh Dawsey that was like joking about me is one of my very good friends. So, like, I read his tweet as a joke, like knowing him really well and we were laughing about it. It's an interesting conversation that, you know, journalists can't be brands and they, you know, should be subservient to the bigger brand.

Yeah, it's important that a brand have a value, whether it's the New York Times, The Economist, Washington Post, whatever. But it's also important in today's day and age that the byline stand for something as well. So I thought it was petty when they were like, you know, I don't know exactly what comment you made, but you said, hey, listen, I have to build my brand too. And I think that's fair. And like, Molly Wood is a brand, Karraswisher is a brand, you're a brand, and you'll rise and fall with your work. And I have to tell you, like, you know,

we differ in some opinions, but your work is exceptional, period, full stop. So if anybody's got criticism, it's just, well, you, did that add a little motivation all that criticism? Because I was talking to Molly offline when we're in a group chat,

I was like, you know, I got to think when they came for you, that maybe you were like, you know what, now it's time for me. to put up some... Bring your cannons. To start dunk.

This happens every time. I don't know if you remember the drama when I started the New York Times who were like so mad that I got a job at the New York Times. This just happens all the time. I, yeah, I mean, I just get a lot. I know I'm a good reporter and I know that I'm getting hired at these places because I'm a good reporter.

And I think building a brand online helps engender trust with your followers and then people read your work. And by the way, like I believe in legacy. media. That's why I keep working for these legacy media brands. I could make way more money as a substack. Yeah. They offered you many time. I want to, I believe in the power of institutions. But yeah, I mean, I definitely, when I had my like White House TikTok or scoop or whatever,

I got so much validation by making all of these political reporters that were on me aggregate my story just to be, you know, days there. It is great. I mean, the re-aggregation. Well, I think you and you and Molly have like. a three-hour lunch in your future to just sit there and trade stories about legacy. I know that in some ways

we're not big believers in offline, but we're going to have a long offline conversation about the New York Times someday because I think our experiences were somewhat similar there. Yeah. Hey, tell us about the book. You took a little sabbatical to get the book done. Do we have a title for the book yet?

Can we pre-order? Give us a little feedback on what we're going to be reading about and when is it dropped. Yeah, it's called Extremely Online. It's about the rise of the content creator industry. So sort of from like 2005-ish to now, from sort of bloggers and YouTube stars and MySpace stars to kind of the rise of the influencer boom, live streaming, all of this. It's sort of how the whole creator economy emerged. Jason, I know you've been there for a really long time. Some of your old blog posts from like 2011.

Not going to work on YouTube's farm no more. Yeah, some famous ones. Yeah, I remember that. So, yeah, it's about that. I think the pre-order is, it's not coming out until next spring. Book timelines are so long. When the pre-order is up, you can pre-order it. But just follow me in the meantime. Well, if you go to Goodreads, I just did a quick Google search.

Yeah, so it's not on Amazon yet, but it is on Goodreads. They tend to get a little ahead of everybody. So extremely online, the rise of influence and the creation of a new American dream by Tella Lorenz is up there. So go ahead and follow it there. And it does not seem to be on Amazon yet. But if you follow it on Goodreads, they'll give you an alert. I'll love to have you back on when the book comes out. And when the next Taybom, we are now officially hashtag Taybom, T-A-Y-B-O-M-B.

So when the Tay-B-B-M comes, everybody's got to throw up their Tay-B-O-M hashtags. Congratulations again. And thanks for, you know, keeping everybody informed. You know, the thing that I think really resonates with me about the work you're doing is, yeah, it seemed light. It seemed whipped cream. It seemed like it was part of, like, the culture. section or styles. But, you know, as young adults,

become adults, and they start voting and they have jobs and these things get bigger. And it influences elections and it influences the economy and geopolitics. You know, like your beat that was, you know, in the style section or maybe over here in culture has now become politics, economy, and international relations, especially with what's happening in Ukraine. Like, should we believe any Ukraine video we? see on TikTok. How do I, this is a question I have.

I see these Ukraine, I see these Ukraine war videos. Should we call it the Russian war instead of Ukraine? I feel like when we say Ukraine war, we're blaming them. This Russian assault on Ukraine, how do I navigate if it's true or not? Yeah. I mean, it's really crazy. I wrote a bunch about this as well. And there's just so much misinformation, old video game footage that's being repackaged.

It's simplistic, like, falling for. I think you just have to use, I mean, this just goes back to basic media literacy, understanding things, like, looking at things. Just I assume everything is fake. Just assume everything is fake. I think that's, just assume fake until otherwise confirmed. Yeah, yeah. And it always, look, it always was.

It, like, Taylor's Beat was always all of the things that you just said. And not everybody was prepared to realize that style section. At the Hilton Hotel in 2016, the night that Trump, you know, issued his acceptance. in speech, I got credentialed for that because I had covered that campaign aggressively and watched where the conservative was leaning. Everyone was hating on me once again. So it's always been intertwined, but I think, I mean, Adrian's kickback is a perfect example. I can't, when the first political mob, you know, starts on TikTok, you can point to these,

like, cultural things as, as the sort of the genesis. So it's really important to understand early because they're going to all have horrible implications. All right. We'll let you go. I know you got to back to a bunch of. backed up media appearances. Everybody follow Teller Leruns on the Twitter and the TikTok. You've been doing a lot of look-in-the-camera TikToks too.

So that's definitely, you've definitely upped your TikTok game. You were kind of passive on there and now you're doing like one a day, one every other day. Yeah. It's good for sourcing. You got to be where the people are, you know? Yeah. I mean, that's how you caught that story. Do your beat.

Like everybody, do your beat. Anybody complaining about Taylor, work harder. I agree. You know, that's what I tell everybody. People were like, oh my God, why Combinators giving more money to founders? Oh, J-Cal and Molly are getting, you know, this great deal when they run an accelerator. I'm like, well, then shut up and run an accelerator and work harder. You're working hard.

You're tracking down these stories. And for the lazy older people, stop criticizing TAMO and Talo and just work harder. Try and break news on my deed. I would love that. Yeah, come at her. I love it. All right, we'll talk to you soon. Have a great day.

Cheers. All right. We got a little news for you today, and the big news of the day is that the SEC is meeting today, kind of maybe right now, March 30th, as we are talking, to discuss a crackdown on SPACs. Specifically, the part where you're evidently allowed when you're going public via SPAC to say whatever you want about what your company is going to do and accomplish and achieve. And in this case, the SEC is considering some rules that would allow investors to sue over, over what they're calling, quote, embellished projections.

Hmm. Okay. Everybody embellishes projections a little bit. Well, their projections is kind of implied. Would you make a projection as a publicly traded CEO that was not aspirational? Well, if you did, I wouldn't want to buy your stock. Right. So I guess the question is, if SPACs had performed well, and there weren't so many of them,

Would this be on the table? I think the answer is no. Right. I think this is a reaction to some of the really poorly done SPACs around specifically the EV market. And so I think this is kind of a reaction to the public blindly buying Rivian, Fisker, Nikola. Some of those are actual frauds and being sued for fraud like Nicola. Other ones are just fantastical delusions like Fisker in my mind. That's my opinion.

And then some of them are just overpriced nonsense like Rivian, where they are just getting credit for things, 90% of what they've, they're getting credit for 98% of what they haven't done. And so who's responsible when a market is out of control? Everybody wants to point fingers when it goes down. But I'll tell you this, the people buying those SPACs were not buying them because they wanted to buy a health. healthy company and have it appreciate at more than 7% or whatever the average of the S&P is and they wanted to have the alpha, the difference above the average return of the market. They weren't trying to hit 10% returns. Let's be honest.

These people were gambling. They were just picking a random number on the roulette wheel and hoping it went 10x. And they weren't doing any research. They were suspending disbelief. You know, they were using, as Chimot said on the last all, and clapping as a strategy, like, you know, clapping to get, you know, blackjack does not help you get blackjack. may make you feel good, but it's, you know, clapping at the blackjack table does not influence the card. So I think this is, I'll be honest, a little bit silly because people buying spacks were, you know,

I think they were in it to do what we do, Molly, which is buy nascent companies and pretend they were venture capitalists and not have to do the work. None of them were doing, none of the retail investors doing the work. Now, does that mean that Nicola is not responsible for the fraud that they are alleged to have perpetrated? No, they should go to jail. they should lose everything when they're caught, just like Elizabeth Holmes should or Bernie Madoff should

or anybody else involved in this kind of nonsense. Should Fisker and Rivian? Well, did they lie? Did they have ambitious projections? And did people suspend disbelief and all throw their money on, you know, in 32 black and then double down on, you know, black over red? I mean, these people were just gambling. And so fine.

I mean, here's what here. Here's the part I think is interesting, is that they seem to be targeting, yes, inaccurate spec forecasts, but specifically they propose curbing the legal protections. This is according to Bloomberg, and this is, by the way, still like anonymous sources. So until this actually, like we said, they're probably talking about it right now, so we don't know. But one of the specific things that Bloomberg notes is that it would limit the legal protection some blank check companies have relied on to make bullish forward-looking statements about the firms they plan to merge with. So obviously that's just the SPACs. But what that made me think of was like, let's take Rivian. Let's say you weren't gambling. Rivian comes out, goes public through a SPAC, has deals inked with Amazon and a deal inked with Ford. And that is a big vote of institutional confidence.

And you're like, they have this deal with Ford. They're going to make trucks for them. It's going to be great. I actually, oh, Rivian was an IPO, not a SPAC. It was an IPO. But I think it does fall into the same. suspending of disbelief. I think Lucid Motors might be a better one,

because I believe that was a SPAC. That one was a SPAC? Yeah, and they, you know, when you, I think we have some, some numbers here, but yeah, they, Nicola, Lourdes Town, and Lucid Motors were all SPACs. Okay. And Nicola was too.

You know, so I think the, the mechanical thing here is when you're buying a company to merge it into a SPAC, which is how these things work, you create the special acquisition corporation, special purpose acquisition corporation to buy one of these the person who's buying it

can make projections about it because they're not the actual company when it's an IPO, it's actually the management making that. So people know this is a special device. Should these special devices exist? Sure, why not? It's a people understand it's different and it's a more risky thing,

which means more return. But I think people... So you're saying if you're going to go after... So you're saying if you're going to, I mean, if you're going to go after bullish projections, like you can't, I don't think you can ignore other IPOs, right? In that case, I mean, certainly like, Elon Musk makes a lot of wild projections at earnings costs.

Yeah, he just hits them. You can't. The problem is he just hits them constantly. Maybe one year late, but, you know. What about the guy in the robot suit? I think that was funny, but I would not, this is the perfect thing. You know, the robot suit, I would say is the perfect example. Sorry, Nick.

Of like, he is going to say this is coming and everybody's going to laugh for three years and then all of a sudden it's going to show up. You know, like, that's exactly what happened with the Model S and then at one car of the year. I guess what I'm saying is singling out SPACs for punishment around bullish projections is disingenuous. Like if you have a problem with overly bullish projections that don't turn out to be true with companies that are trading on the public markets, that should apply to every company. It should 100%. Yes. And I think Rivian is one of the perfect examples where people are conflating. They're literally conflating a letter of intent or a brand or a logo being associated with a company with actually. performance.

So that is clapping at the blackjack table. And then that company goes public and the deal all of a sudden falls apart and is gone. Ford is like, oh yeah, we're no longer partners with Rivian and everybody who invested is effectively a bag holder, which I guess is, you know, all the more reason. Any of those people. Spacks aren't the only problem here. Of those people who made the bet, how many of them saw the contract with Ford? How many people read it?

How many people asked to see it? How many people went on Twitter and said, can they? they cancel? How many went to the annual shareholders meeting or wrote a blog post, a medium post saying, should we discount this because we've never seen the contract? Should we discount this because we don't know the terms or it's canceled? Those are the questions you have to ask as an investor. We ask these questions all the time. You've been through the diligence process now so many times, Molly. And how many times do we find red flags? And then we have to decide as an investor. Do we want to ignore the red flag or do we want to say it's a minor red flag that's surmountable or it's a major red flag?

Yep. And then you look at it in relation to the valuation. And that's when reality sets in. And that's no different in a SPAC than any company going public. Either you're doing, you know, I mean, SPACs obscure some diligence and they ask you to trust that the holding company has done that work. Right. You're like a, you're like a syndicate member.

Yes. Believe that we've done the diligence. Right. But still do your own. But still do your own. And then maybe here's a kind of. concept, maybe bet sizing. So let's say you did fall in love of the Rivian. And you're like, you know what, I need to put, I've allocated $50,000 I'm going to invest in, you know,

really risky projects that I hope have a disproportionate return. And I get a sense, Rivian, Nicola, Lorristown, and Lucid and Fisker all fit into this thesis. And I got this $100,000 sitting here. I'm making $100,000, making it a split. Okay, so maybe you put $5,000 into five of them. and then you keep the 75K over here. And then you start looking at how it's trading and how their deliverables are. And then every quarter, you look at the performance of those five companies

and you say, okay, I'm going to put every quarter another 10K. So over the next eight quarters or so, I'll put on average 10K into one of them. That performs the best. Let's say, Niccolo collapses. You sell your shares, you lose half your money. You get that $2,500 back.

You put it into the best performing one. then you, whoever the best performing one is this quarter, you give them 10K more. Now the next quarter comes along. Okay. It turns out, I don't know, Rivian's doing the best. Lucid is doing the best. They delivered the most cars. Great, I put another 10K in.

And you just keep reallocating based on that. And then you look at the whole space and you're like, the whole space is garbage and BMW and Tesla and Ford are crushing in any of these. Okay, you know what? Now I'm going to just take all my money out of these speculative bets and I'm going to put it into those three. That's called being an adult and doing analysis and shaping your bets. over time.

Like the SEC can either say we're not comfortable with SPACs as a vehicle for sneaking someone in the party without properly checking their ID and vaccine status. Yes. Or they can say this is part of the market and the protections are all applied equally and everybody needs to be careful about what they're doing. Yeah. Like they can't, singling out these cats, like saying like, this is terrible and maybe shouldn't exist, but we're going to let it exist, but we're going to make special rules for it versus

anything else in the public markets is frankly absurd. Well, here's the thing. The way SPAC's work is, you know, the people who buy the SPAC are trusting the manager. So you're buying the manager, whoever they are, and won't mention any names here, to find a great company. And then you watch the pitch of what they're buying. And then you decide if you want to buy into that. It's riskier than in some cases going directly into a company or a company that's older.

everybody wanted to get in earlier okay if you want to get in earlier welcome to my world 80% of the bets I make go to zero and I've been saying this as all these SPACs come out which is if this is what you want to participate in

this is this is the big boy table this is the big girl table you're no longer at the kitty table this is where like it gets a little dice so the SEC can only protect you so much well yeah I mean

the SEC, they're already sort of, you already have an ability to group your investments, right, by low, mid and high risk. Yep. Like, what if the SEC just said, we consider SPACs to be in a higher risk category? Like, if you think of your, you know, if you break it up like a retirement fund, right? Your Vanguard fund, you got your 2040 or 2060 or whatever. Like, maybe the SEC could just say, hey, everyone, SPACs are higher risk. They're more akin to the Vanguard 2030 fund than the 2080 fund.

Correct. Boom. Done. They don't have special rules because some of them might turn out to be fine, but just understand that this is a slightly riskier capital situation. I don't know. Done. Yes, we're done here.

I mean, I think that's what you should do. And just to go through, you know, another example here, or just to give you a little update and how SPACs are going, the market is working. People are looking at the SPAC category now and saying, okay, It was easy money in the beginning when the market was hot and people were doing stonks and there were stimmy checks and everybody was at home betting on stocks in the future instead of gambling on basketball and football and baseball and whatever else they gamble on. Well, according to Bloomberg, just 46 new SPACs have despaqed so far this year raising $8.9 billion. We are in a different world. The market has corrected.

People are now looking at SPACs and saying, okay, those are risky. I'm not going to participate in them anymore or if I do participate in them I'm going to do it with a smaller footprint of cash which is like scratch off tickets or the lottery or any other high risk activity you need to do your research

that small amounts as the company grows you can always allocate more capital to it absolutely but you're in an inverted yield curve environment then SPACs aren't going to be that attractive which means they can They can bet bigger. They can be risk.

Which means if they're out of favor and nobody wants them, there might be some cherry picking you could do here. If you lost a ton of money in SPACs and they're all on the floor, you could actually start following them. And a great thing to do would be to if you really are trying to learn how to invest, if like my brother was asking me, this is what I always use as my disclaimer. And they're like, I'm obsessed with SPACs. I'm like, okay, take $1,000 and here's what I want you to do.

you to pretend it's 100,000, take the $1,000 and allocate it to 10 specs at $100 each. And then I want you to reallocate every 30 days. So on the first of the month, you reallocate based on the data, your instinct, what you've researched. Do that for 12 months. And then look, did the thousand become 2,000 or did it become 500? Mm-hmm. And then did you learn anything? And did, were your bets, write down your bets, write down why you reallocated, while you dropped one, while you doubled down.

and this would be, then what you can do is you can add two zeros to it. So what I did when I was starting to learn poker is I would go down to Hollywood Park, I played the smallest game possible, $1, $2. And I would add three zeros. So I pretended I was playing $1,000, $2,000. And what that did in my mind was

it allowed me to pretend that I was really investing large amounts of money, and so I would play better. And then I would pretend I was playing $1, $2 again, and I would try any strategy I wanted to. And I wrote about this in my book, Angel, where I started playing what I call Jedi poker. I put the blaster shell down.

I literally would peel up my cards at the poker table and put my thumb over them. Everybody at the table thought I knew what my cards were. I didn't know what my cards were. Wow. And then I put my poker chip back on top of it. I'd look at the table, and I would make my decision solely on what the other players were doing.

And then I could, I started saying, I think that person's weak. I think they're bluffing. I think that person's strong. I think they're medium strong. Okay, if they're medium strong, if I re-raised them, they're going to fold. And let me try taking my time.

Let me try checking my cards twice before I make my bet. Let me try making fast bets only, right? So I could see if they could pick up on my towels. And this became like amazing because sometimes when I play Jedi poker, I play better poker than knowing what my cards were. And I was like, wait a second. This game is not just about my cards. it's about what cards they think I have and what cards they're representing to me.

And so that's the advice I'm trying to give people here by not giving financial advice, but giving thoughtful advice on how to learn. And one of the lessons here is, if you want to be a private market investor, and that's what SPACs kind of are, even though they're publicly traded, be careful. Well, it all is. It's all gambling. This is just higher risk gambling.

And so just choose your risk accordingly. Yeah, I'm sort of like, I mean, maybe I'm making a hard turn from public radio here, but I don't understand this sort of, you know, parochial, like, overly parental approach. Like, well, only certain people. I mean, you know, we've talked at nauseam about accredited investing and the rules for that and why there need to be these sort of extra protections. But like, it feels a little hypocritical to me to say, we're going to allow this vehicle to exist, even though it's inherently and fundamentally risky.

And then to then come along and be like, oh, we're going to make special rules for this thing that we specifically allowed to exist. Like, no, no. If it's fair game, it's fair game. I think what you're realizing is that this parochial patriarchal, you know, nanny society leads to people abdicating their decisions to the referee, as opposed to just playing the game better themselves. And so the SEC is the referee.

I understand, you know, maybe there are some more disclosures that could happen. Maybe they should. Like make more meaningful, right? Like make meaningful, if you have rules, apply those rules equally. Yes. I think that's what they're trying to do is make the SPACs not have this exemption and make them have a little more ownership. But because you have this dynamic where it's a holding company that people bought the shares of the holding company,

trusting the person running the SPAC. The SPAC lead is you're buying the SPAC lead's ability to pick a company. Yeah. That's what you're buying the SPAC. And then in an IPO, you're buying the company. So just in your mind, let that sink in. If you think the person who's sponsoring the SPAC is credible, thoughtful, then back them. If you don't, then go buy stocks direct or here's an idea.

Buy the Vanguard funds, use wealth front. I'm a previous investor in that they got acquired where they just charge the lowest fees. Put your money in and don't take it out and just set it and forget it. And then move on to other things in your life like investing. yourself. So we're going to move on to our next story, but producers have a question. Producer Nick, you have a question for Molly and I. Let's hear it. Yeah, I'm curious if you think that instead of regulating the projections that the companies make, you think it might be more beneficial to retail investors if the SEC regulated the terms of the deal on the promoter side. So a lot

of times in these spec deals, promoters will buy less than 1% of the company and get a massive like tens or hundreds of millions of dollars deal fee. And it essentially incentivizes them to bring anything public, not really. 100%. Yeah. They should disclose that. Not only should they disclose it. There should be a page on the SEC where you see all the SPAC deals and it's in a database

format. And you could see the average investment by the promoter, the average fees by the promoter. And then you could rank them and sort them. Just like you could sort executive comp. You could sort, you know, price to earnings ratio. put it in context. So this SPAC motor has 1% $10 million invested in the deal.

This person has 4% and $4 million, right? Because the percent is one number, but if it's a huge SPAC, it might be a bigger actual real number, right? Or smaller. So you just give people the data and then tell them where on the spectrum it lands.

Just like when you weigh yourself and you get your BMI, you should know, well, for a 50-year-old male, here's where you stand. And it helps you contextualize what your ideal weight is. And that would, if you measure it and you disclose it,

then people can take into account and then now the managers are going to say, oh, maybe I should, this doesn't look good, maybe I should put more money in. And maybe I should have a holding period. So how long will I be on the board?

How long will I hold my shares? Am I locked up? I think the SPAC promoters should be locked up for like five years or something like that, right? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think, yeah. Yes.

It makes perfect sense to regulate the mechanics, because the mechanics are where things get sketchy. If you're trying to, if the incentive is bring as many deals as possible, that's venture capital, right? That shouldn't be public markets. Like, there should impact be a bar for companies to go public. Not to be naive, but, you know, hope springs eternal. So regulating, I think, to next point, the mechanics of that,

that would, that make it easy to distort because there's too much financial financial incentive to push things through quickly, for example, makes a lot more sense than saying, like, don't have bullish projections. Yeah, and then one of our noties, and I think you're exactly right, Molly, one of our notie members in the YouTube chat, we tape the show live every day. If you want to watch us do it live, YouTube.com slash this weekend. You can hit subscribe and hit the bell so you get alerted when we go live. Francis asked me, Jason, ever think of doing a SPAC? I was, intrigued by the concept, but what I realized is I do my best work, not in trying to sell

the public markets on buying a stock, but on working side by side with the founders in the early days to get product market fit, to build a team, get to 10, 20 employees, and get to 2, 3 million in revenue. That's where my zone of excellence is. And I think in life, you've got to do what you enjoy and where your zone of excellence is. I would not want to be involved in these SPACs necessarily unless it was one of our companies that I did Shepard there. Yeah, sure, I would consider being involved in it at that point, maybe. But there's plenty of people who do this, and it's less interesting for me. Also, it seems like a lot of paperwork.

I'm just saying, maybe not as much paperwork as it should be, but a lot. That's exactly the point. If you start doing these things, what's going to happen is your life will become meeting with lawyers, regulators, accountants, not talking to founders about their product and their team. and their culture. And that's a fun part. You got to pick what you want to do.

BALT's one-click checkout competitor FAS is having trouble raising $100 million out of $1 billion valuation according to the information. The article cites at least three people with knowledge of the numbers. Uh-oh. According to the information,

which generally gets things right. It's a paid service, I think $30 a month or something. So it ain't cheap, a couple hundred dollars a year. And so they're not doing this for clickbait. They're doing it in a pretty thoughtful way over the information. I will give them credit for that. In 2021, Fast Generated 600K in revenue with

500 employees. This makes me feel good about generating $4 million at inside.com with 25 employees or 4 million in advertising for this week at startups with nine employees. And I don't make to laugh, but. Well, yeah, but did you raise a hundred and two million Series B in order to, I mean, they raised $102 million and managed to generate around $600,000 in revenue with 500 employees. So if I'm not that good at math, but. Back in the envelope. Back in the envelope. Revenue per employee around $1,000?

$1,200, right? Yikes. $1,200 of revenue per employee. Yeah. So their competitor, Balt, which I have. I believe is the one formerly run by startup Jesus, uh, psychedelic startup founder now, Ryan Bresloh. No judgments.

I think psychedelics are cool. I don't encourage you to take them, but I do think they probably have some medical validity and should be researched further. I shout out Tim Ferriss. Fast employee, fast hold employees, its goal was to process one billion in transactions 2021. Again, top line revenue. How much do you make from that is the key.

Yeah. And this is where the devil is in the details. According to investor presentations, fast 2021 transaction volume only reached 30 million, which is a fraction of one billion. Roughly a third. Last closed round was $102 million series. Yeah, 3%. Oh my God, 3%.

Right, because they said a billion. See, this is why I don't do math ever. And certainly not live. You just have to do math slower. Reporters question numbers equals mistakes. Literally, could somebody send Molly and I a calculator that if we do the math on the calculator, we can literally hold it up and show. That would be amazing.

Yes, please. It is like something that people have stopped doing in life, which is math. And I do math with founders in meetings with them. And they're like, how did you do that? I'm like, division. So just let's keep a calculator. I like to show what that equals. Can I have reverse Polish notation, please?

Fast blast closed round was $102 million. Anyway, $102 million. Yes. I mean, so I will say VCs led by mafia. I mean, there's so many levels of this that are interesting, right? It's like, here you have Ryan Breslo complaining about the Stripe Mafia. Stripe led this round that pumped $102 million into this company that didn't seem to do a lot with it. Breslo, of course, like mentioned fast in his first manifesto and implied that this was one of those companies.

And all the, and by the way, yesterday, I mean, VCs on Twitter were so. enraged. Like this is this sort of like poster child for the company that just like great founders just get left out, right? They don't raise anything. And this, for whatever reason, people just keep throwing good money after bad into this company. Evidently, that was the reaction on, on Twitter at least. Yeah. So now is the issue here that Fast was backed by Stripe to go after Bolt? Is that the accusation? That was Ryan's accusation. Was that Fast was basically like spun up, almost created whole cloth by stripe to go to kill Bolt. Right. And then I believe the Sequoia VC was the one dunking on Breslo.

And this is where like VC should just stay out of it and be like a little bit elder states people and maybe stay above the fray because this is inevitably what happens. If you start all these fights, it's hard enough to run a company. But if you start picking fights and, you know, poking the hornet's nests, uh, what's going to happen is people are going to start leaking your numbers and you're now going to become the target of investigative journalists and, you know, back and forth on Twitter and all of this sniping between companies, investors, et cetera, when you should have your head down trying to get product market fit. And so I always tell like my founders, if you want to get involved in this like

high stakes public fighting, you know, make sure you're fighting up. Make sure you know how to do Kung Fu because you have no idea where the energy is going to go. This is why MMA is such a compelling sport because one crazy kick can knock a person out. The person who's the underdog could get somebody in a chokehold and get them to submit. Like weird stuff happens. And that's what you're seeing here.

Everybody wanted to have their two cents. Ryan Breslo started spouting off mafia nonsense. The fast person was spouting off, you know, how great they were. That kid can never stop promoting. Stripe is making big bets. The VCs are coming in having their say. Just everybody shut up. Right.

Well, you go find. Go find great. F like you. To the point that other founders were, BCs were making yesterday, go find other great founders. Like you're going to have a fight to the death cage match on Twitter about basically like two identical white guys with two identical companies.

We're harder. Go find other companies to fund for God's sake. Just go fund another company and just like, and I just tell founders sometimes like enough of the fighting. Can we focus? You know, and this is coming from me, somebody who spent a lifetime fighting. I get it. You know, like, I know, like, I was like, a certain point, do you really want to die in the stay above the Frey Hill? Because that doesn't sound very fun for you. Listen, you could have playful fun in fighting. Anytime I get into, like, fights now, it's typically

playful. Um, and it's, it's not like intended to, you know, like be taken too seriously. Focusing on your customers, focusing on your margins, unit economics, your team is what's important here. And the bigger picture here is getting to scale is hard, getting product market fit is hard. And if your metric for success is raising money at increasingly high valuations and getting in fights with people, you're going to fail.

You're going to fail. And now the market's going to whip soar you because you've raised so much money that when you are only generating $1,000 in revenue per employee and you're burning money like a drunken seller, well, you know, this could be the start of the debt spiral where people stop believing in the business. So now you've got to really prove it.

Keep your head down, work hard, stay out of the frame. The end. Unless you got the numbers to put up, you know, like if you want to start dunking on people. All right, so just, you know, Molly, we have these incredible Nodie gang members here.

We watch the show live with us. Cerecle. YouTube.com says this weekend. And sometimes, man, they just hit the logo shot. And Toby Zhang coming in hot. It's a heat check moment for him. he's at the logo he throws it up nothing but net toby zang fast would generate more revenue if all the employees game uber drivers oh my savage i just like i need my ripleg for that

i need my red flag i need that is a foul that is a foul oh my god unnecessary roughness ruffing the kicker flagrant two for the love of god toby that was savage but in fair If you're doing 50 days a year and they made $4 per UberX ride they would only need to do a ride a day to make more than you can't hear J-Cal on the calculator right now

like I did the calculator if you work 200 days a year and you F off for the other you know 50 Twitter thread Toby's getting a Toby's getting a Ryan Breslo-esque Twitter thread from the FAST CEO. Here's what FAST could have done.

Fast could have bought many of the companies in our portfolio. we're making a long-term bed. Yeah, but our companies are not starting fights all over Twitter. Don't get a bunch of your startup. Listen. And be coming an overdraft. Fast could have bought a case of water at Costco for 25 cents a bottle,

bought a bag of ice, put it in a cooler. Fast employees could have gone to the, you know, Warriors Arena and sold ice cold water for a dollar a bottle. And done that for the 80 games. Dirty Dats. Dirty dogs. They could have some sausages. It just could have been street vendors and done.

better. They could have taken, they could have gotten Booleg warrior shirts and sold them outside the arena. All right, enough. We should not be dunking. Now Francis is like the Stripe Mafia is going to whack Toby Zhang. They're going to come for him. He's going to get some cement shoes. 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 Syndicate of over 9,000 accredited investors at the Syndicate.com. Producer Justin here, no cool startup? Check out Openscouting.com, where anyone can refer a startup to our investment team here at launch. Even if you don't know the founder, if you're the first to flag a company for us and we decide to invest, you'll get 5K in cash or 10% of our carry.

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