This Week in Startups - Facebook puts Instagram Kids on pause, Bevy’s high-profile firing + Squarespace’s Anthony Casalena | E1291

Episode Date: September 27, 2021

Jason covers Instagram's Adam Mosseri announcing the pause of Instagram Kids (2:09), the recent firing of Bevy employee following a hostile interaction in Brooklyn (21:51). Then, Squarespace Founder and CEO Anthony Casalena joins (35:43) to discuss what marketing channels have been best for growing the company, new products offerings and shares stories from scaling and more!

Okay, we've got a great show for you today on this week in startups. I interview my friend Anthony Castellania from Squarespace. As you know, they went public recently. And he was last on the podcast a decade ago, episode 100 or so. And now he's back a thousand episodes later. Squarespace has grown from a couple of dozen people with him racking servers to 2,000 employees, a public company. And he was in a very candid mood.

We talked about his direct listing. We talked about scaling a business, scaling a team. and he talked about all their near-death experiences as a company and why he's still engaged in Squarespace now more so than ever, in fact. But before that, we're going to talk about some news. Adam Osari went on the Today Show and talked about the train wreck that is Instagram and Facebook and the Facebook papers. He actually came up with and talked about some ideas that we talked about last week on the program

in terms of people taking a pause from their social media and maybe building in some monitoring tools for parents. Finally, Bevy, which is a virtual events company, has fired an employee who was caught being racist on video in Williamsburg this past weekend, and there's a ton of fallout. I think this is an important discussion for startup founders and employees about your personal behavior and how it relates to your company's reputation. Stick with us.

It's going to be a great episode. This week in startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Marketing, To redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. Silicon Valley Bank

For over 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has been providing banking and financial solutions for every stage of the startup journey. Learn more at SVB.com slash twist and disruptive advertising. Sign up for a free digital marketing audit at disruptive advertising.com slash twist.

Plus, if you go into business with disruptive, you'll receive a $250 gift card and a free Friday to Sunday ski trip in Utah. Okay, everybody, in our first story, Adam Mosari says Instagram is taking a break on their project, Instagram for kids. So we talked about this on episode 1284 when we were talking about Wall Street Journal

Facebook files. That is the moniker given to a bunch of leak internal research and presentations and all kinds of materials coming out of Facebook over the last couple of weeks. And we also talked about how the leaker is probably going to uncloke themselves. This is, I think, if you haven't seen the movie The Insider, Michael Mann with Russell Crow. I think it's Russell Crow's greatest performance after Gladiator, but it's probably tied in terms of, I mean, two different types of people, two different types of heroes. But really, absolutely go watch the insider because it's about the whistleblower in the tobacco industry and how hard it is to be a whistleblower. This whistleblower, I think, is going to go down in history as one of the

most important people of this era, potentially, because these studies are so damning, And I think it's going to result in Facebook people resigning and maybe lawsuits and any number of events that will be considered a turning point in our industry. The leak studies included a 2019 slide from Facebook's internal research. They do internal research. They fund research, which claim that Instagram makes, quote, body image is worse for one in three teen girls, amongst other negative health impacts that we know about social media. and the leaker is in all likelihood from inside of the integrity department. Kid you not, Facebook has an integrity department. Fate loves irony.

And the leave reporter from the Wall Street Journal on the Facebook file says that many employees in the integrity department have been very fed up because they've been proposing solutions and they feel like they're being ignored. Sound familiar, go watch the movie The Insider. Same thing happened in Big Tobacco. And there was also a similar cover up inside of cars with Airways. Airbags and seat belts. Yeah, Ralph Nader's book, Unsafe at Any Speed, where he talked about the automobile industry. I've never actually read the book, but that would be a good one to look at.

So we have this long history of corporations, maybe not doing what's in the best interest of the public because it would have such a bad impact on their growth and the personal wealth of individuals inside companies. So here is Adam Mossari. I don't know when Adam joined Facebook and Instagram, but you know, you can be certain that if he's running Instagram, he's making millions and millions of dollars a year. you know, maybe $10, $20 million at the end of the day with the value of all the stock options and what they'll eventually become worth. So he came on NBC's Today Show this morning,

and he announced that Instagram for Kids project on hold, really, due to all this public outcry. One minute clip, I'll talk to on the other side. You guys have had this research. You've had this information for some time. Why not do some of this sooner? So we've actually been working on a lot of this for years now. We do this research to shed light on problems. That's the whole point of the research is why I'm actually proud that we do that kind of work. That work has inspired lots of interesting product changes. For instance, we announced a couple years ago we wanted to lead on the issue of online bullying. And the research we did when we asked kids and teens why they didn't block people who were harassing them on Instagram was that

they were worried about fear of retribution because they have to see these kids in school. And also, they needed to track what was being said about them. So that inspired the restrict feature, which we launched a few years ago. So over the years, we were constantly doing this research, both internally and externally, and using it to inspire changes to the product. Okay, so he said a whole bunch of nothing there. I mean, great.

They studied bullying, but really didn't answer the question, did he? You know, the question is really like, why is this taking so much time and why would you ever even consider doing a kid's app? So instead of doing Instagram for kids, Mousari says they're going to focus on making more parental controls on Instagram's current app, which is what I said last week. You know, no kids should be on there and parents should have access to their kids' Instagrams in a, you know, R-packed, which is an app

that some friends of mine have told me about where you make an agreement with your kids, hey, I'll let you use Instagram, but here are the rules. I need to see what you're doing there. When you post an image, I want to approve it first, or I want to be able to see your DMs. You know, the idea that you would see DMs for an adult would be spying on each other. But with a kid, it's kind of training wheels, right? You don't let a bunch of kids go to the mall when they're 10 years old without supervision. I mean, my parents did, but it was a different era. You know, you probably want to have some amount of supervision at a party where kids can

interact on their own in the backyard or at a park, but you're kind of off to the side watching them. There's some agreement here that kids can make with their parents. And so I think that that's ultimately where this goes is that kids who are just like when they drive a car, you know, if you have GPS in your car or a speed limiter for a child who is now 16 or 17 years old to becoming a young adult and they want to drive the car, they're giving up their privacy of location. They're giving up the freedom to speed in exchange for getting the privilege of driving the car. Kind of there's an analogy here, I think, for social media as well.

You want to use social media? There's going to have to be some guardrails. You only can drive during the day. You can't drive at night. You can't drive on the highway. You have to be within 30 miles of the house. You get the idea. So, Masari gave an interesting answer here when asked about the leaked research.

75 seconds. I'll talk to the other side. Let's talk about the kids for a second because according to your own research, as I understand it, a third, roughly a third of teenage girls who said when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. How do we fix that? So I don't believe that's exactly what the research said, but I do want to be very clear that if anybody leaves using Instagram feeling worse about themselves, that's an important issue that we need to take seriously, and then we need to figure out how to address. And so we have a number of ideas in the world of body image and negative social comparison.

Last week we announced that we were working on nudges, the idea that if you're going very deep in one topic, we might nudge you to try another topic. And another project that we call take a break, the idea being that you could put your instant. Instagram on pause for a period of time if you're in a moment of vulnerability. Maybe you're going through a breakup or you just switched high schools. So I know the details are being worked out, but this take a break idea. How will that work? When will we see that in our feeds? So the way it would work is that your Instagram, your account, your profile, how you show up, would essentially be on pause. So the specific details we're still working through, but you would be, the idea is that you wouldn't have to worry about people talking about you, addressing you,

commenting on your content while you were on a break, you would basically be able to leave and then come back and pick up exactly where you left off. This is exactly what I said last week, right? There should be timeouts on social media. You press a button and it says, I don't want anybody to view my profile. Essentially like your order responder on email tells people, hey, listen, I'm not here. I don't expect a response. Imagine you came to my social media profile.

I did this over the summer. I said, hey, I'm taking a Twitter break. because I have to focus on the book. And I just the last week, I got sucked back in, but I'm going to take another break because I keep getting pulled back in. But the ability to press a button say, I want to be on break for the next 30 days or indefinitely, then no comments come in, no likes come in.

And maybe you can't see my photos. Maybe I'm ghosted basically. It says, hey, Jason will be back on this date. If you do that, what that would do is let give people permission to not feel compelled to check it. That's a great idea. That's why he suggested it last week. And I think it's probably a fairly obvious one, right?

I think probably all of us take social media breaks, but incorporating an inch of the product would be great. Listen, right now, LinkedIn is going to give you $100 credit towards your first ad campaign. I want you to go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups and get that hundy right now. Now, why would you use LinkedIn marketing? High quality leads. We all need leads. We're all running businesses here.

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Once again, LinkedIn.com slash this. week in startups for the Hyundai, no spaces, no dashes, and terms and conditions apply because they're giving you a Hyundai. The other thing they should incorporate into the product is turning off all of my previous posts at a certain date. So I talked to Jack about this at Twitter, and I was like, listen, I took down my entire archive. I deleted all those posts with tweet the leader or one of these sites because I was like, I don't even know what I said 10 years ago. I downloaded the entire archive. I put it away. And I was like, I just don't want to deal with these old tweets as I get higher profile. Somebody's going to take a tweet and maybe who

I responded to, that original tweet's not there, the context is lost, et cetera. And in the early days of Twitter, it was like a chat room. People would go back and forth, you know, a hundred times in a thread just saying, hey, what, you know, whatever. It was like a much more chat roomy kind of service. I was like, you know, these things could be taken away out of context. I didn't say anything like super offensive or anything. I'm smart about using social media. But I just like, I just don't want to even have this archive here. And what I tell people is, like, there should be a feature where I can just automatically archive anything I've done older than X days, and I put in X days.

And Twitter should do that. Instagram should do that. Instagram does let you archive photos and turn them up, but you have to do it one at a time. So they're constantly throttling this kind of stuff so you don't have the protections or the feature you want because they do what's in their best interest, which is engagement. And they've been doing that for so long that now when it has a negative consequence, here they are when the car is crashed, when it's obvious that they're disingenuous,

when it's obvious that they've acted in their own self-interest, it's only when when the press and the leakers hold their feet to the fire and they've got them dead to rights that they even modestly change their behavior. This is why people hate Adam Mossari, Zuckerberg, and the whole crew at Facebook. The reason you're so hated, the reason why you're a pariah in the community is because you've made so many of these bad decisions so consistently for almost two decades. You keep making horrible decisions that are not in the best interests of society and that's why people hate you. If you work at Facebook, Instagram, people hate you. People hate you for working there and you shouldn't work there. You should go work for a company that's

we're all positive. And if you think Facebook and Instagram we're all positive, they're not. We all know they're not. And so you staying there, making all this money, it's just such a bad look. And when you watch Adam Wasari's answers here and you see him looking down, he's ashamed of himself. It's so obvious that he's in it for the money and he's ashamed of what he's doing. That's my take on it. I feel like a lot of shame coming from him and like his heart's not really in it, but he's in it for the money. And that's just my read on the guy. Okay. So some new features on the regular Instagram app that Mossari mentioned, as we talked about, is users going, when they go too deep on a topic, that it could nudge them. This is also a decent idea.

If you use TikTok too long, and I've had this happen, it's like, hey, yo, you've been scrolling for a long time, take a break. Man, TikTok is so addicting. So the take a break feature and the nudging, I guess that could work a little bit. But really, I think the parental controls, when we're talking about kids in mental health, is the key to taking a break. obviously a great one. I'll give a lot of credit to real investigative journalism. You know, we really have been concerned about the media. We had a big discussion with Bology on all in episode 48 this past Friday about the media. And I have basically come to the conclusion because I had a brunch with a friend of mine and we've both been in journalism for a long time

and she wants to go into venture. So I was just giving her some advice. And she was kind of disillusioned a little bit with what's happened in journalism, and she's very high profile. I put journalism into a couple of buckets here. You have content creators, corporate, as Bologi would call it, but you know, the link-baiting, you know, let's call it BuzzFeedy kind of stuff, or really a portion of BuzzFeed, because BuzzFeed has a number of these in the same umbrella. But let's just say, you know, the, and then the middle, there's like the virtue signalers who have an agenda and they fit everything into their own narrative. I put like the Vox kind of virtue signaling, like we're anti-Trump or MSNBC or even Fox News on the other side

or Ben Shapiro on the other side. We're just going to like really have an agenda, whether it's virtual signaling or conservatism, but not journalism. And then you have the old school journalists. And this is old school journalism. We're going to get information. We're going to really think through it thoughtfully. We're not just going to cut and paste it and, you know, do what, you know, Julian Assange did with his leaks or, you know, just do a data dump, they're being thorough. And they are methodically going through the Facebook leaks, the Facebook papers, and trying to make sense of it. And again, you know, we had John Kerry Rue do a great job with bad blood and his reporting

on Theranos. I should have got a Pulitzer. It's crazy he didn't. They need the Pulitzer organization needs to make up for that. They really should go back and say, we made a mistake and we want to give John Carriru this. you know, because if you make a mistake as an award show, I think you have an obligation to go back and fix it. Like if Goodfellas didn't get the award, I really think they should say, how great would this be if the Oscars every year said, we're going to look back on 10 or 20 years ago and say, this is our biggest mistake, according to the fans. The fans believe that this was actually, you know, this film should have won best picture based on time.

and it'd be like Blade Runner, you know, or Goodfellas. Like, they should have gotten more recognition. I would love to see that. So investigative journalism, huge win. When we talk about journalism, we talk about reporting. We kind of talk about it with a wide brush. There's really four buckets now. There's that content, you know, low-quality, link-baiting, terrible journalism.

There's the biased agenda, you know, driven journalism, whether it's MS, NBC, Fogg, box, whatever it is, is an agenda. Then there's classic journalism investigative, which I'm talking about here. And then there's the new one, which is the going direct crowd, myself, other CEOs, founders, or who would normally be the subject creating their own media channels. And so I think this is just a great, great for that classic bucket of investigative journalism to do this great. Masari joined Instagram in 2008 as product designer and became head of Instagram in 2018. Obviously, Kevin Sistram and his co-founder of Instagram, Mike Krieger, they really hate Zuck. It's so obvious.

And they said negative things on the way out, just like the WhatsApp founders. So as I pointed out many times here, when you make people billionaires by buying their products and they hate you, that says something. That's how much Zuckerberg is hated by people in the industry. If you talk to almost anybody in the industry and I talk to everybody, people absolutely hate Zuckerberg and they hate Facebook. They hate the way they behave. They feel like they're pissing in the well and they're causing problems for everybody because of their bad behavior because of their product decisions.

And you know who hates Zuck the most and who resents Facebook the most? The people who worked there and had great success and made a ton of money. Just go right down the line to all of the people who were part of that original team and they are the most critical and they hate Zuck the most. That's not a really great legacy. And I think Mossari, Zuck, and everybody over there needs to look in the mirror and say, what are we doing? Is it worth it?

I think you're all just sellouts and you're doing it for the money. I'll be totally honest. I don't think you do the right thing. Every chance you have to do the right thing, you don't do it. And that's one person's opinion. And I would say 90% of people in the industry have a strongly negative view of Facebook. 90% of the people inside the industry have a strongly negative view of Facebook and are rooting for its demise. So that's an interesting rub.

If you are inside of Facebook, I can't tell you to do anything illegal. But I would say if you know of things inside of Facebook that are morally bankrupt or corrupt like these people in the support division, again, I can't tell you to do anything illegal. What I would say is I have respect for whistleblowers who, because of a crisis of conscience, decide that they're going to take the risk of being whistleblowers. I actually do respect that. And I do think there's a distinct difference between giving over the names of, you know, people who might, you know, I have some problems with what Assange did because he just dumped all this information.

And I think he did it in a sort of Joker chaos kind of way, like Batman's Joker. Like Keith Ledger Joker, some men just want to see the world burn kind of way. But I think working with journalists who, like the Wall Street Journal, who should know about malfeasance, who should know about bad behavior, who should know about people doing things that are not in the public's best interest. I think I'm okay with that. Not only am I okay with it, I think that the people who leaked the information there are now, and I think people who are leaking right now out of Facebook are, in my mind, heroes.

That does not mean just for the lawyers. I am encouraging anybody to do that. I'm just telling you my personal feeling is that these people are heroes, if they work with the journalist correctly and, you know, there's no collateral damage. Okay, next story. This week in startups is brought to you by Silicon Valley Bank. What's next? What if?

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Saturday, there was a confrontation in a park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, between a white woman and a black man named Frederick Joseph. Joseph recorded a portion of the confrontation and posted it to Twitter with the following tweet, at the dog park in Brooklyn with my fiance, and this white woman was threatening to call police and told us to, quote, stay in our hood because she had our dog confused with another dog who had been barking loudly. I don't understand what that means, but okay. So I started recording and she tried to slap the phone out of my hand. Here's the video in case you haven't seen it already.

People behaving badly. I'll see you on the other side of the clip. Stay in our hood? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm going to invite everyone. Stay in our hood. Stay in our hood. I'm sorry, what?

stay in our hood stay in our hood you just hold us you just hold us to leave the dog partner stay in our hood oh my god did you just ask me check wow wow wow the karen isn't the white there's i'm sorry you were right here watch this entire thing did she just not stay in here tell us to stay in our hood she did she just told you just told obviously this is super gross um and i i don't know if the woman looks inebriated or not somebody mentioned uh on social that she might have been drunk or and this kind of bad behavior you know, stay in your hood, hood to a black man. I mean, really super racist. And I think there is a concern that if a Karen like that calls to police that a police interaction could occur,

and we know that sometimes police interactions go wrong, so this could be a life and death situation, especially for a black man interacting with the police. White woman calls. There has been a long history of, you know, bad instances. in that specific dynamic. And so it turns out as the internet is apt to do, the next morning the woman was doxed, and it came out she was an employee at Bevy,

which is a SaaS startup that sells virtual events software. I happen to know the founder of this company, Derek Anderson, because I believe he was the founder of startup grind. And I think I did the first interview that startup grind ever had, like a decade ago here in Silicon Valley. So once she was doxed, Joseph then tweeted at the Bevy CEO and co-founder, Derek Anderson, with a screenshot to a CNBC article about Bevy bringing on black investors for their series C-round,

indicating that if Anderson cares that deeply about racial inequality, maybe he should do something about this. And Derek spoke with Fred T. Joseph, that's his handle on Twitter, about his and his fiancee's horrific experience from last night. This is a quote from Derek on Twitter. So sorry to them. For what happened, no one should treat people the way we witness. This is extremely troubling. I'll update you shortly. And then on Sunday, he said Bevi H.Q has zero tolerance for discriminatory behavior of any kind.

Yesterday, employee engaged in behavior contrary to our values and has been terminated. We apologize deeply. So Anderson's handling of this was criticized as well, like as maybe a rash decision, maybe people shouldn't be canceled, et cetera. So this tweet from reason.com editor, JD, to Chile. Hopefully I'm pronouncing your name correctly, JD. Here's his quote. The correct response was to point out that the dispute involves private parties in their own lives and not your company you failed.

Yeah, see, I disagree with JD on this because if you are going to behave, in public in a really egregious way, which I think we'd all agree that this was pretty egregious. I'm not sure any, maybe 99 out of 100 people would say that this is really disturbing a religious behavior. If the public believes your behavior is egregious, then it automatically will be associated with the company you work for. That's just the way the world works. If you're a flight attendant, a pilot, a waiter, a CEO, a

sales executive like this woman, that's how this goes. You're responsible for your public behavior. I will point out, have these Karen's not watch Karen videos before? Like, do you not know that any bad behavior, insane behavior that you used to get away with yelling at service people, being belligerent, getting drunk and saying something stupid, saying something racist or, you know, I'm trying to be charitable here, you know, you were drunk and you said something slightly racist. I mean, I don't know how charitable you could be here. Like, don't you know that it's going to be recorded and don't you know you're going to suffer massive consequences? I mean, these idiots are going out there and coughing on people or, you know, starting fights on flights. You know what's

going to happen. Does anybody getting on a flight, a Karen or a Ken, without their asking at a flight attendant, not know they're going to get taken off the flight and everybody's going to videotape their walk of shame as they get dragged off the plane. Like, I think people are losing their mind in COVID. That's one of my theories is that COVID creates like 40 or 50% of like cognitive anxiety in people. And so then when in the world something happens that is challenging for them, they automatically are at their process is already at 50%

that maybe they have a bad day or maybe they drink or something and then all of a sudden they just lose their mind so all right here's Frederick Joseph who seems like a very reasonable person who I think handled this

with a lot of grace you know I'll be honest and he posted a follow-up video so he's actually been quite responsive in his position here to explain what he thinks. So here's a minute 37. I think we should watch the whole clip and I'll talk

you on the other side. So I was just told that Bevy has terminated Emma Sarlie after her racist attack against my fiance and I in the dog park. And while it's unfortunate that she had to lose her job, I do think that this brings up an important conversation about accountability, especially in a country where black and brown people, marginalized people as a whole, have seen so little of it oftentimes, right? You know, having to bear the burden of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., I think that it's important that people know that there are consequences for their actions, right? And I don't think that it's up to victims to have to coddle, you know, people who are engaging in abuse.

You know, when I woke up yesterday morning, I didn't expect to have to be a part of this conversation. I didn't expect to go to the dog park as a black person and have to receive, you know, racism. You know, so while, again, it is unfortunate what happened, I hope that, you know, Emma learns from this. I hope that other people learn from this who engage in abusive, racist, and destructive behavior. because ultimately, whether I'm lost her job or not, doesn't take away the trauma that my fiancee and I have. It doesn't take away the feeling of feeling like anything racist can happen anywhere. So I don't think that people should be coddled.

And I do think that consequences are important. So hopefully this is a learning lesson for everybody. Yeah, I mean, well said. Important note, Joseph is the author of The Black Friend on Being a Better White Person, So imagine the statistical chances of this individual saying something racist and they say it to the author of the black friend on being a better white person. I mean, fate does love irony. So I guess Twitter users are accusing him of inflating the situation to sell his book. That seems crazy to me.

Like, this whole thing was set up? No. definitely not. And I don't think that a person went to the dog park hoping to have somebody say something racist to them. Kind of crazy. One Twitter user tweeted the following at Bevy's CEO, and I thought that this was a very interesting moment. Who knows if this is a real person because it's Twitter, so it could just be some trolling spam Russian account. Amy Cooper currently has a federal lawsuit against her former employee for firing her about investigation or falsely laid. being her a racist. I hope this girl sues her as too. If you don't remember, Amy Cooper was dubbed dubbed the Central Park Karen. She falsely claimed a man was trying to kill her. And she was recorded because he asked her to move her dog off an area where dogs weren't allowed. Anderson quote tweeted, this is the head of Evie who made the decision to fire the woman who said, you know, to get out of our hood. He said, do what is right. Let the consequences follow. I think that's pretty correct.

Yeah. And if you compare that to Zuckerberg, he does what's profitable, regardless of the consequences, and the CEO is doing the opposite. In related news, according to a Wall Street Journal article last week, adults were throwing tamper tantrums at an increase rate due to the pandemic. So my anecdotal hunch was right. The statistics about these tantrums, customer satisfaction is at the lowest levels of 2005, according to American customer satisfaction index. This is while people are investing in customer support and everybody understands that customer support is critically important. think people just lose their minds in stressful situations. What's the most stressful situation you could be in in modern life? Yeah, traveling at an airport during a pandemic, maybe with your kids, maybe you miss your flight, maybe you have to get a hotel room like, yeah, missing your flight or a flight being canceled. That's up there in terms of modern day, you know, stressful moments when in fact, it shouldn't be. Like, you know, if your car breaks down and you have to wait for roadside assistance, like, just be

thankful that you have roadside assistance and it's not like the old days where you park the car on the side of the road and have to walk two miles. The FAA quote has initiated more than 750 investigations. The FAA has initiated more than 750 investigations pertaining to, quote, unruly passengers so far in 2021. 750 investigations. In 2019, there were 146. So it's 5x, like literally 5x. That's crazy. 80% of food service workers, said they either witnessed or experienced hostile behavior over virus safety measures according to a survey done by one fair wage. Why are they increasing? Well, it is about stress and people will, when they're stressed out, take it out on other humans. It's just the sad part. If you're going to do

that, just take a deep breath. Like, we're all humans. We're all feeling the stress. Be nice to each other. In the love of God, it's hard to be a service worker. Like, if anything, even if you got bad service, like, have some empathy for the restaurant that can't get and that those employees are putting themselves at risk and just give a 50% tip, 100% tip, if you can afford it, and be thankful that you actually can go to a restaurant and that there's some number of them still opening in business. I know some people were in the comments were really upset that I even covered that story, but one person was, yeah, I'm out.

Why are you giving this person a platform? That's interesting. I think discussing these issues on this podcast is of, I think, it's kind of within my right to discuss these kind of issues because I find it interesting. And it's something that startups and tech executives have to deal with firing somebody for their personal behavior and how it reflects on companies. So I felt like that was in my, I was in my right to do that. Okay, everybody, let's take a moment to talk about growth marketing and all the tactics and hacks that are out there with me today.

Jake Fadsguard, he is the CEO and founder of Disruptive Advertising, which you can visit at Disruptive Advertising.com slash twist. So some questions for you, Jake, what are some of the tips you have for marketers who are planning to take advantage of Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year? Yeah, Jason, 2020 was a phenomenal year for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And 2021 is shaping up to be as good if not better. We actually have a benchmark report where we're monitoring. $250 million in media budgets. And we're seeing that CPMs are starting to rise in the 20 to 40% range in a lot of industries. And so I'm just worried that a lot of companies are going to get surprised that there's a lot

of demand, but the competition is up as well. And if they don't have a good strategy for that, they're going to spend the same amount and get less performance or they're going to have to spend a lot more to get the same performance. And so they've got to get on top of that. So if you want to sign up for a free digital marketing audit with Jake and his company Disruptive Advertising, just visit Disruptiveadvertising.com slash twist.

And if you go into business with Disruptive, you will receive a $250 gift card and a free Friday to Sunday ski trip in Utah. We'll see you on the slopes. It's going to be a great season. All right, next up on the program. Back, 10 years later, his last appearance was in January of 2011, episode 112, 112, a friend of the show, supporter of the show, Anthony Casalena.

who is the founder of Squarespace, which recently went public by direct listing. Welcome back to the program a decade later, Anthony. Thank you for having me back, Jason. Pleasure to be here. When we met over a decade ago, you had this, you know, let's face it, boutique, a little software as a service startup, subscription service to make beautiful websites that would solve the problem of, gosh, building a beautiful. website was really expensive, time consuming. You had to go on Craigslist and find a designer.

A lot has changed since then, but at its core, Squarespace's value proposition, I think, is still make a beautiful, high functioning website. Am I correct? Yeah, you know, it's expanded a bit over the years. I mean, we launched in 2004, and I started programming in 2003. So I think that, you know, the two main propositions in there was an all-in-one website building platform, do-it-yourself, tool that was also incredibly design-centric. And, you know, I think, you know, the web has changed a lot in 18 years. And I think over the past 10 years, and especially over the past three or four, you know, we've really been focused more on commerce as well, in addition to our core in terms of websites and domains. And, you know, commerce, not just in terms of, you know, physical products,

but all the other ways people are transacting online. So services, reservations, you know, events, to go ordering any way our customers are transacting is something that we kind of, we want to be a part of to create that kind of, again, it goes back to the all in one thing. It's just the aperture is expanded now to include much more. Yeah, I mean, people make websites. It's not just to put up a corporate website. A lot of times the actual business is, hey, come take a course on my website, subscribe to my newsletter.

I'm, you know, I've got my own little e-commerce shop. And I think that's, I think one of the things that I, It was interesting to watch you build the company was you kind of kept the price the same and then just kept adding features, which I think is a quick way to delight users, reduce churn. What's the scale of the business today? And is that, in fact, the strategy, try to keep it really affordable, but then just keep adding features, adding features, adding features, so that people grow with you.

Yeah, I mean, what we offer today at the price point we offer is incredible. I mean, we've been building this platform for the, you know, the platform relaunched in 2012. So for the better part of a decade, all those innovations have gone kind of to one thing. We have introduced some slightly higher price plans around e-commerce and different things. But you're right. I mean, at its core, it's a really, it's a really accessible price. And, you know, we're always layering in more and more and more to that core subscription. So, I mean, the scale of the business, let's see.

You were referencing 2011. The run rate back then was probably ballpark of 12, 13 million. And now I think as of, you know,

Q2, let me get you an exact run rate. Yeah, let me not mess up any numbers here. They're online. They're online. In Q2,

we reported 778 million annualized run rate to not in a quarter. quarter, a Q2 for us was 196. What, what have you learned running a company that was different, you know, in 2010 versus today? Wow. Well, a lot. You were like, how old were you?

I mean, how old are you now? Are you 40? No, I'm 39. You're 39. So when you were on the program last, you were 29. Yeah. And you started the company when you were 24 or 25. So it's basically, you square space is basically your entire professional career.

you've learned a lot and you kept the CEO slot, right? I mean, a lot of times people would, in a growing business, maybe they'd say professional management, did they ever try to push you to put in professional management? No, I think for the past decade, that that's really not been something we've talked about. I think, you know, it's something I consider, you know, in terms of like, do I like what I'm doing?

You know, every single day. You ask, you know, what's changed in 10 years. I mean, we're 1,500 people today across, and we've, you know, done acquisitions. we're across so many different product lines. We're public. You know, we have different constituents. I mean, that is a totally different thing than, you know, 10 years ago.

We had just, we had just done our first outside round with index and Excel. And, you know, we were like a year into that. And totally different kind of management team, totally different employees. I mean, how many employees do we have back then? I had like 50, 60 when we talked. So much smaller. So, yeah, I mean, you know, you talk to a lot of, um, startup founders and CEOs. I mean, the job of, you know, what you're doing in 1,500 person

company is completely different than what you're doing at 60. I mean, you know, before we got on, you were talking about, you know, I was on CNBC yesterday, talking about some new product releases we had. You know, got all these investor meetings. Now, you know, external, you know, all the public side of things. So you're talking to analysts. So, yeah, it's totally different. Talk about management teams over time because we all know when you start a company, you're bootstrapping it, maybe you got a little bit of money. Let's face it, you can't pay the salaries that people who work at giant publicly traded companies can or salaries that people like Google or Facebook at scale get paid.

So you basically grab your friends or you hire from within. And then over time they say, hey, you got to get professional management. Hey, you got to get somebody who's done this before. And obviously somebody who's been the CFO of a public company is not coming to work at 10, 50 person Squarespace. And they shouldn't, right? Because they're going to get bored, right? I mean, everything they're used to in terms of infrastructure.

I mean, a CFO of a public company coming to 20-person Squarespace, the finance team publicly traded companies probably multiple times aside that they have no infrastructure. People forget sometimes things move very fast in a startup, but actually, they kind of move really slow sometimes, too. I mean, you've only got a couple engineers. Yeah, you can iterate faster because you don't have, you know, all these eyes on you and, you know, deploying a product that, you know, is relied on by millions like what we have is very different than, you know, there's tens of thousands of customers and we're just quickly

updating it. We can roll back in a second. It's not, you know, a million, you know, it's a different thing. But yeah, I mean, look, it's the hardest part of it, right? That the people who have all that experience, and the big managers who manage managers and all that, it doesn't apply when you're 20, 30, 40 people. And it's just a different. different skill set. What about when you get into that middle stage or tweeter, now you've got a couple

of hundred people. It's pretty clear. You have product market fit. It's scaling every year. During those years, you're probably doubling your revenue year over year, tripling your revenue. You're growing 10, 20 percent month over month. And now you got to make that decision. Okay, I got somebody who's in this position who's grown with the company. But man, they're in over their head. They've never done this before. And they're telling me, hey, I got to bring in some more senior people. How did you manage that whole transitional and evolutionary period because I know I hear from the boards I'm on in founders

could be kind of the hardest thing. Yeah, I'd just go ahead and say like, I don't know, poorly. Like, I mean, you look back at that. Not that poorly because I'm here, but I mean, yeah, I look back and I'm like, that thing that took three years should have taken one. What was I doing?

And all that. I think at, I'll say, I'll say two things during that time. One is a lot of the time when the person's not working out in the role, they end up failing their peers as much as they end up failing you. And there's a bit of a situation there.

And I'm not talking like people just can't get along. I'm talking like they're not delivering for one another. They're not showing upright. So the one team can't plan because the other team is just not doing the work. And so that's one source of like sort of, hey, I got to have a conversation here. You're not working with you.

You're not giving them what they need. Or they're failing their teams. And then the other thing, So that's bottom up and then there's people who are on the team with them side by side with them. Yeah. And then the final direction which was kind of tough for me is they actually have to show up

to me differently because you know, you can't like I don't know your one-on-one's a long time. Yeah, when it's small. They're not like, they're not so formal, right? They're not just showing up with the deck and here's this and here's what I deliver. I almost feel like when it gets bigger, you know, my department reviews with my execs. It's almost like the board

meeting and I'm the board and they're showing up and presenting stuff and this is their time and we're checking in and I want to know how they're running things and what I can, you know, unblocked for them. And for a lot of people when it's smaller, it just feels weird to start to show up to me in a much more formal way. And unless they do, I'm done because I can't, I just can't, I just can't run it any other way. Yeah. When you get to a certain scale, the stakes have gone up and if you look at it like the difference between playing basketball, you know, pick up basketball in the park. You know, you turn the ball over, whatever, you know, you don't play defense. Who cares?

It's a game in the park. But now you're the Knicks. You're in the playoffs. You know, and you see some player is not hitting their free throws. The other team members are going to go to the coach and say, hey, we can't have this person in the game, or at least not in this role as a starter. Maybe they can come off the bench and do other things here, but they can't be, you know, on the floor in the final 10 minutes. Yeah. And then I'm going to get pissed because we're a sponsor of the Knicks.

were on the jersey and we're going to pull out. That's right. You guys forgot that. You were the first. We were the first patch on the Knicks. That's right. This is actually a very interesting thing. I think that you also were not only first on the logos on jerseys because that was a big deal.

People forgot that when the Knicks and a couple of teams tested that, that was a first for the NBA. There was a big controversy about it. Oh my God, we're going to put a logo on the thing. You were also first to podcasting. We were very, very early. I mean, you were one of our first five, I think one of our first is Bing, yourself, MailChimp, Walker Law. We had like four or five sponsors in the first year or two that were just incredibly supportive.

Yeah, I mean, we've been doing that for over 10. Oh, definitely. It's got to be 10 years, yeah. It's at least 12, maybe a little bit more. But, I mean, it's always been a huge great meeting for us. Go ahead. Well, I was going to say, what was it about podcasting? and the Knicks jerseys and these kind of things that you saw early as a marketer,

when at those times, everybody was saying, you know, buy Google ads, buy Facebook ads. Well, we do that stuff too, right? I mean, so I would never, you know, do brand the exclusion of direct response that's working. And, you know, also I might mention, I think we're at our seventh, eighth Super Bowl out now. I mean, that's a lot. And when we were doing those a while ago, you know, we were in a... interesting context there. You know, it was a lot of car companies and carbs and alcohol and, you know, and then there's like websites. It's like, really? But, you know, it worked for us.

I think to answer the original question, though, regarding podcasts, so back then, it was much more of the Wild West. And what was great about it is you had these really great show creators who had a great connection with their audience. And for us to be able to go to somebody and, and educate them on the product and say, look, it's marked as an ad, of course. You know, all of our ads are marked as ads. But we want to support you. And if you really like the product, talk about it. And people would do an ad read and it'd be authentic.

And that would work with their audience. And they put a coupon code in the podcast. And they tell their listeners, hey, you know, Squarespace is a supporting show, use this coupon if you need a website, blah, blah, blah. And it gave us great attribution. It gave us great reach, right? Because podcasts are listened to it all, you know, if we're doing an English podcast, you know, non-English markets as well, so it gave us global reach. And, you know, back before

people would swap the ads out, the ad would just play forever. Oh, that's right. I mean, certainly we hard-code them into ours. So whatever ads you did over the decade, they're just there forever. And that was always my philosophy on it. So you got, I think, to write it a little bit about doing the Super Bowl ads. Those cost millions of dollars to both produce, I think, and to run. Are they effective? I mean, I would assume you don't. don't do them if they weren't. And are they effective in driving response or are they effective in sort of building a brand that can then attract talent to come work for your company and to go public and to invite, you know, introduce your stuff to investors? So, so they're definitely not

direct response, right? We don't think people, you know, on their whatever drink are going to stop watching the, you know, the Super Bowl to go make a website like in that moment. That's not what we're aiming at. We do see, I mean, of any, so I'll say a couple things. it's the only time people want to see advertising. That's true. That's such a great point. There is no other one. Advertising is better than the game because Super Bowl's tend to say.

I watch it for the ads. And so like, I mean, and. No shame. And, you know, it's the time when, and we're, I consider it's an incredibly creative company. We're one of the few companies in tech, I think, that, you know, has had a chief creative officer as part of the executive team for over a decade. And it lets you show.

off creatively. You know, we do a little bit of avant-garde. You know, it's a bit hard for us sometimes because I think that, you know, the Super Bowl's just everyone, right? And so you can't get an ad that appeals to everyone unless it's like, I don't know, like a Budweiser puppy or horses and stuff. And we're not going to do that. That's not in our, you know, brand DNA.

But there are millions and millions of people who are watching the Super Bowl, including everyone for every creative agency who made all those ads, by the way, watching every single one of them. that lets us put a cool message out there and show off creatively. And I just love the opportunity. And I'll say this too. Of any kind of ad we do, that's the one I'm sure people saw. Like, not everyone does get seen by everybody. But in terms of like traffic to the site, you know, articles about it, both good

and bad, whatever, because you're going to be the top and the bottom of every Super Bowl ad meter or whatever. There's stuff like that. It's also the only ad we do that gets, you know, depending, on the creative, be invited to shows on television, they play the ad for free. Yeah, that's a crazy part about it. They ask you to talk about it. I mean, like, no other thing has anything like that reach-wise and attention-wise. So it's incredibly, and even in like the second place thing you would do, like a Grammys

or an Oscars or something, it's not even close to the same. Yeah, no. Not even close. Definitely not. And there were a number of times that people thought, well, you're going to get run over because there's so much competition that emerged in website building and Google, I remember, was going to create the WordPress and Squarespace, killer.

All of this sort of competitive landscape was very dynamic in your space. Once people saw your success, and I think what Matt was doing over at WordPress, these two companies, two different approaches, right? One's an open source, kind of messy, and then the other one is like elegant and refined. It's almost like Android and Apple.

if you think about it. Thank you for that. Thank you. I didn't say, you said it. Well, I mean, I'm good friends with Matt and I'm friends with you. I like Matt a lot as well. Yeah, I think it's actually, the world needs both of those things. Some people would want to get under the hood and tinker and, you know, put plugins in

and other people want to have something elegant and simple. Yeah, a lot of, I hung up with Matt a couple times, a lot of respect. He's a great guy. And, you know, they built something really great. But look, I mean, the design-centric side of things is in our DNA. We do that. Like, that's one of the founding principles, you know, for the company that, you know, I wanted it to stand out in a certain way. I've invested in creative almost like no one else has.

And so, yeah. So when all these competitors happen and everybody's telling you like, oh, you're about to be roadkill, et cetera, how do you, how did you keep everybody sort of focused on the mission? One of the things that's, you know, obvious to your success is this relentless focus year after year. And I should say, like, everybody thinks this goes really fast. when in fact it's methodical and it's year after year decade after decade. It is slow. When you get that product market fit, it's about building and delighting and refining.

So how do you keep the team, stoked to keep pursuing this with all this noise on the outside? Look, I mean, so we get the competitive. I've gotten the competitive question the whole way through. It's funny to even get it now that we're a public company. People are like, oh, my God, there's so many competitors. I'm like, you know, these days I kind of only hear about like three. So, I'm surprised.

It's WordPress and Shopify, right? I mean, that's it. Yeah, maybe one or two others. But the, you know, like, back when I started, they were like, it felt like there were like a thousand, you know,

and there still are a lot of niche ones, but what's great about what we do is it's so broad that we can hit so many different verticals and so many different use cases. And like the stuff we do is just such like fundamental building block stuff, right?

It's like a domain, a website, a flexible content, management system, you know, e-commerce, physical products, digital products, donations, services, like all this stuff. It's so broad. And that's what enables us to do these kind of big ads. If it was so niche, you know, you can't do those kinds of ads. That's why the Super Bowl is like beer and cars and like laundry deter.

It's like stuff everyone has, right? And so we're not at that level, but it is a broadly used thing. Lots of people have websites. It's incredibly relevant in people's lives. Look, I mean, we try and remain innovative and to push things forward and push the envelope with our ads and our product releases. You know, sometimes we are rapid fire on those. Sometimes it takes longer than every single person, you know, in any of our positions, you know, you want things to go twice as fast. And it just doesn't happen that way.

It can't happen that way. But trying to remain relevant, remain in front of trends. I mean, if you think about where we are right now, just to pick two off the top of my head, You know, we've done a lot of investment in our member areas product and that lets people make paywalls and subscription content. You can mix that with our email campaigns product and make a paid newsletter. You can mix that with our e-commerce products and have a paid newsletter where you're also selling a book all in one website. And, I mean, that's amazing. And that stuff that's just kind of starting to kind of pick up right now.

And then also, one of the things we did is a couple years ago, we joined forces. we acquired a company called Unfold, which lets people on Instagram and other social platforms. It started with stories, sort of to brand themselves and help them stand out. And, you know, the insight there was,

you know, a long time ago, people would start with a domain, start with the website. A lot of people start with Instagram. And they prove out their brand. They grow an audience and are trying to stand out there. And so Unfold is evolving now into a toolkit for creators

where you're saying, hey, actually, you can make a site in your, you can create a super quick website, put a link in your bio, and create a, we call it a bio site in one second, you know, in one minute in the app,

and it can help you schedule your Instagram story. You know, it's like, it was such a great purchase because you, it's such a great observation in that social media is the onboarding,

not the website and domain anymore. It's where people are starting. Yeah, people start there. And they still are. And they still are. Bio is such a really weird device that occurred because Zuckerberg

didn't want, or Instagram didn't want people clicking out. Right. So because of that, it created this weird behavior. Oh, do a link in bio. Totally. And now that link in bio is a mini micro website. And there's like 10 competitors in this space.

And you were smart enough to buy this site. Well, we actually, we actually, we call them biases. We actually developed that after, internally inside Unfold, after they joined with us. And so, I mean, Unfold's been moving an amazing clip. It has great success. I mean, unfolds into top 10 in graphic. and design in about like a little under 100 countries. I mean, it's got over, you know, 140,000 ratings in the app store. It's got a lot of, it's got a lot of traction. And so when we roll out

things like biosites, make that available to, you know, millions of people all at once and make that like super easy. It's, it's pretty exciting. It's really, it's a great angle for us. Yeah, it's very interesting. There's a singularity occurring in design, social, and publishing and the creator economy. Canva on one side saying, hey, create stuff. And they're starting on the margins to maybe getting into hosting stuff and graphics. And then you have on the other side, people like yourselves. And then you have the Patreon's. Now Twitter is adding subscriptions.

I guess substack, Twitter bought review their email product. But making it one product and people not having to manage seven different services is really the vision, isn't it? Absolutely. And that's what we've been just dead set on. And again, going back to our kind of all in one philosophy and our take on the web over the past 10 years, it's just been, you know, looking at how people are transacting. We have an eight-year investment in our e-commerce product. We, you know, we have a multi-year investment in our email campaigns product, multiple-year investment in our member areas product. And now via some acquisitions over the past couple of years, we bought a company called Acuity, which is, you know, a huge player in its space for scheduling.

It's doing amazing. Oh, I remember that one. So that's so now, if you own a hair salon. or you're a masseuse. Right. You're booking appointments. It's built in. And if you think about it, you know, you talk about, okay, look, obviously Shopify's

incredible. It's an amazing company. I think they've done a great job. Of course. It's selling physical products. They may expand beyond that, but how many people are selling services? How many people are selling subscriptions to content? I mean, that's a huge, huge opportunity.

It's just everyone's focused on that because it's so that, you know, it's the obvious public competitor. But like, as we all know, SaaS businesses are in. amazing. What happens you need democratize access to recurring revenue to so many people who are selling so many kinds of things? It's fantastic. So we're really ahead of that. And I'm, you know, that's, that's where I'm, that's where I'm focused. It's a great focus because if you think about Kevin Kelly's, whatever it was, thousand or two thousand true fans, if you, as Square States, enable some writer, some photographer, painter, whatever masseuse, whatever the gig is.

Yeah. To just get their thousand true fans to pay a five, ten, ten, $20 a month subscription, that person is now an amazing entrepreneur and sustainable for the rest of their lives. And they can do it themselves. They can do it themselves. You don't need to have a tech person or anybody to add to that mix. When you look at email, do you guys charge like consumption-based email or just throw that in like as part of the project as part of the service?

It's a separate subscription that has like a quantity associated with it. It's very competitively priced. What did you think about the, you know, Melchimp and the Maltim? The Melds salad. Yeah. I have a theory, but I want to hear yours first. Oh, I want to hear yours too. Let me think here.

Because they said they would never sell. Yeah, but you know what? You know what? How old are they? 18 years? Yeah, it's been a while. It's getting close to 20. For sure, it's over 10.

We know that. Oh, yeah. It's at least 15. It's at least 15 years old. 15, yeah. Let's call it 15 to 20 years old. Yeah. I mean, and I don't know.

Oh, my God. 2001 they launched, so it's 20. Oh, wow. Yeah, I didn't miss was that far. Wow. No, I mean, I knew it was really. I mean, they had a great run. At some, you know, you got to get into the psyche, I think, of the founders.

And I met Ben once or twice at a dinner. So, and it was a while ago. And so you don't, you don't know. But, I mean, what's the tenure of most CEOs? Yeah. Is it 25 years? Is it 30 years? Is it 20 years?

I mean, that's a long. Hired CEOs, it's under 10. And then, you know, five probably. And then what about founder CEOs? I mean, 30? How many had 30? Maybe 20. Yeah, maybe 20.

20. See, it's 20 years. And at some point, the bigger company, like we were referencing earlier, you were doing a very different thing day to day than what you were doing when you were, you know, creating things. You either have to find ways to make that energizing for you or, you know, you just kind of might get sick of it all. And sick of all the requests and everything that people want. And, you know, the HR job becomes, you know, a lot. The PR job becomes a lot. And, you know, we exist in today's world where, you know, a lot of, it's just a tough world

to navigate, even if you have the best intentions. And so you're 20 years in. Maybe it's just sick of it. I don't know. Yeah. No, I think there's an exhaustion that happens. I mean, you're basically running a marathon every year, filled with a bunch of sprints and a bunch of hikes in between.

It just, it never ends. And my, I think the, well, no, I was going to say my theory on it was, if you look at review and substack and some of those folks, I think they're looking at email and saying, well, we're not going to charge your email. So you have some competitors out there that maybe say, you know what?

That's why I was asking, like, do you charge for it or not? Like, maybe email becomes free up until X amount, and it just becomes a less high margin business. And they were pure play, right? Just email. Well, they've tried to pivot out of it. Yeah. I, you know, they say they do like websites.

And it's not really a thing we find competitive. And it's like, I mean, in some way, in some ways, I wonder about the companies. And I wonder if their name and what they've done actually, even if they can innovate outwards, constrains them, right? MailChimp. Are you going to go to MailChimp or Squarespace? I mean, come on.

Like, you're going to go to Squarespace. Like, we've spent a billion dollars associating ourselves with this. They have the name mail in the name. And then, you know, Shopify, similarly. Shopping. Shop, you have it in your name. And we don't have website in our name, but we did spend a billion dollars making you associate that. And so, you know, it's kind of interesting. I thought it was interesting also. People

were a little outrage. Oh my God, people didn't have equity. You know, the whole value proposition they had to people was we're going to max out your 401ks. We're going to pay above market salaries. And we're going to give these huge bonuses every year. They had profit sharing. And people were making, you know, pretty serious money for working in Atlanta. They were the best paying place in Atlanta, for sure. I mean, look, you know, because we have other equity investors, you know, I I think it makes sense for like a company like ours to think about an equity program. Obviously, we're public now. I want to align people for, you know, I want them to be shareholders.

That's part of our DNA. But in a place where they own everything and they're saying we're never exiting, why would you want equity? Yes. That doesn't make any sense at all. You're basically here, here's dead end equity. And yeah, they could create a phantom, you know, kind of equity program inside. I think that does Bloomberg do that?

I think some people have done this phantom equity thing. Yeah, like the private, like there's going to be a way to do it. I mean, we all get four and nine A's or whatever. I think the way these phantom things work is they're like, in the case that there's a sale, you have this many units out of the hundred units. You have one unit, you have point five units, whatever it is. And if we have a sale, you would get that percentage of the sale, but it's, you know, it's more taxable as income than anything else.

And these people got three-year programs. Yeah, or you could just simply go, hey, look, we're never going to go to public, but we're going to do a 409A every quarter and every quarter will buy back X at the four-09-a price, which is pegged this in public company multiples. This and this percent. Okay, fine. It's some kind of fair market value. It's not like I think the public markets give you fair value.

Well, yeah, no, I mean, we'll get to that in a minute. Have I let's say that? Well, the public markets are challenging because they could either overestimate your business or they could underestimate it and you have no control over that and you must sit there and work while somebody is measuring your company incorrectly. It can be brutal both ways. I mean, you had somebody's. Companies that went out and spacked like Nicola, that became worth $30 or $40 billion, and they have

no cars on the road. It's a total scam. And they're being done. It's insane. Let me ask you this. I know you had offers along the way to sell out. You didn't. What was your thinking on that?

Did you ever come close to thinking, yeah, you know what? This would be a great moment for me personally to cash in my chips. And how do you mitigate that as the founder, you know, these big offers that come in? Well, I mean, you know, one of the ones that kind of kicked off the whole. sort of where we are now situation is. So, you know, I started a business taking, you know, $30,000 from my parents and ran into cash flow break-even for seven years. And then somewhere along the way, I can say, I mean, it was, you know, we got an offer

to buy scores from Getty images a long time ago. I remember that. Yeah. And so that's how, so Jonathan, the founder, the founder, the founder, is still on our board. And through some roundabout, you know, a series of like, testing the waters with that. What does that mean? no, I don't want to do it, like all that stuff. Ended up finding a different route, which was saying, look, I don't think I need to

own all of this. I want to do some secondary. I don't need a lot of primary because I'm cash flow break even. And I think the board and the outside validation would help me attract the kind of people that wouldn't join a company that's just the 27-year-old Anthony Costellana show. Who knows what this is? It seems promising. but like, really?

I'm 10 years old in this guy, whatever. I'm just going to leave and just, okay, like that's the next step of my career. So it's limiting. And so I think via just operating the company to, you know, not big losses and break even, it provides opportunities for even more secondary along the way as people became comfortable with that notion.

And, yeah, I mean, and that was- You did repurchases with General Lantic and some other folks along the way, if I remember. Totally. Yeah, a multiple. How do you manage those with, you know, the team? I know that this is complicated because you've got people who've been there for eight years. You've got people who've been there for eight years.

How do you mechanically operate or how did you, you know, these kind of stuff? Yeah, those tender offers and keeping people from getting wildly distracted or greedy or, you know, whatever can happen when money's involved. Hey, look, I mean, well, a couple things. One, on the later rounds, people were able to sell, I believe it was up to 20% and up to 30% at the same terms as everybody on those later round. So it wasn't like you could just dump everything. Pari Pari, pari, I guess. Or pari pari, yeah. Everybody sells at the same percentage, yeah.

Yeah, they could do it. Right. And now, I mean, look at the world war on right now. We're public. People could sell whatever they want. They could buy whatever they want. There's no lockups. And that's that.

And I think, you know, look, if you like what you're doing and you're still having fun and it's still a growth story, it's not like because people have maybe made a lot of money that they are ready to leave the workforce. Right. It doesn't mean that they want to be entrepreneurs, frankly. I mean, a lot of people who have been doing the job on bigger teams, whatnot. They don't want to be entrepreneurs. They don't want to start something. Right. So, you know, do they want an industry change?

Do they, are they unhappy? Would they like a similar job at another company? Maybe, maybe not. Especially if you do it for all, you have a lot of good relationships, you know, where I think, you know, I certainly wouldn't be doing this anymore if I thought we were sort of like out of steam or something. I think we do lots of exciting things. And so, you know, so that's the equation.

Like, yeah, you could buy a better house. You didn't have like this fear that, oh, we're going to give liquidity. People are going to run for the doors after they cash in their chips. People stuck around. I had that fear, but like, I think the reality of it is, what are you going to do during the day? Okay, your house is five, you have five bedrooms instead of one. I don't know.

Like, what do you want to do? Did you want to leave the workforce? Did you want to start something? It's an enabler for people. And frankly, if somebody's here and just so completely miserable, anyway, they're just waiting for them. That's not the person I really want to work with on my team. Yeah, it's better for them to have that opportunity.

It would be better for them to leave. So there are many people at Squarespace that are pretty wealthy. And, you know, we're all kind of working on these things, myself included. I mean, I did secondary 10 years ago. I'm still here. And the company is, what, 40, 50 times bigger? I think the secondary thing has been absolutely fantastic for employees and for founders so that they go longer. You know, when I was coming up as an entrepreneur, yeah, just before you and I sold Weblogs Inc.

There was no concept of, hey, here's an investor. They're putting $2 million into the business and they're going to give you and Brian Alvey and Peter Ross a million dollars each. Keep going. You can pay for your apartment. That didn't exist as a concept. Back then, back then when I did the index itself thing in 2010, half the people who are looking at us were like, great business, won't do this deal, you're asking for too much secondary.

And I was like, I don't need to do a deal with any of you. It's cash flow of make even. You can either be a part of this story or not. They're like, how? You get all this money. You're going to go anywhere. Where? I still want to build this thing.

If I wanted to go somewhere, I would sell it. So interesting. So they basically, at that time, people were so anti-secondary. They were like, I'm not going to even touch this deal. what a stupid decision on their basis. Well, not all of them. No, the ones you turned it down, I mean, they missed huge returns.

But you know what's interesting? It's like, okay, well, where does that mentality come from? The financial people or the financial, it's like money, maybe this is everything. They're just going to leave with this. Because I think there's a lot of people, I don't know, I don't want to generalize, that maybe would leave financial jobs if they had certain amounts of money.

I don't know. I don't know. And it's direction we love it. I don't want to generalize. No, no, in the finance space, they have, they look at the finance and it's like, well, that is the end game. And so if we let them hit the, you know, end zone, they're going to leave. They're going to get the championship. They're done.

And they don't realize that it's the joy of playing the game for a founder, the joy of building a team and being part of some camaraderie that is actually making them show up. And a lot of people in the industry, I think even Fred Wilson, Ron Conway, when secondaries came out. And, you know, obviously I'm very friendly with Fred. They were like, I'm not so sure about this. and he struggled on his blog with like, what is the right amount. And what it actually did was the opposite of what the majority thought. The majority thought this would be a distraction and it would make founders quit. And it turned out it made founders go long and it made everybody more aligned because the venture capitalists are making a million dollars a year in fees or $2 million a year.

They're swimming in it. Maybe that's the funny irony of it too. They seem to be making a great amount. They're not going anywhere. That is the... What's so far into this about this concept. I think they, you know, have to remember, in the balance of power prior to 2010, let's say, before Facebook and Uber was, and before White Combinator, really, I give Paul Graham some credit here. It was, the founders are, you know, serve at the behest of the investors. And you will be replaced.

And I certainly, yeah, you will be replaced. That's a good one. I mean, but also, I mean, there's something to it too in the sense that, like, I think if, you know, you have a lot of resources available to you throughout your whole life, it might change your hunger level for pursuing an entrepreneurial idea. Maybe. Right. Maybe. Maybe. If you're a trust, that's not a kid. Maybe. Maybe. The difference is these are people who already selected in starting a company. They've already selected that they want to be in pain and suffering every day of their life. Yeah. Even if they didn't realize how much pain and suffering they would be in.

I mean, it's painful. It is. I don't know if you had near-death experiences, but take me to the darkest moments, you know, now that you got the victory and things are going so well, you know, when you look back on it, was there ever an existential moment where you thought, this thing's not going to work out? I'd say there were a lot of existential moments, but I didn't have one that was like this won't work out.

Okay. Because after year one or two, it always worked out. But the question is, is going to kill me along the way. And that was like kind of, you know, some different things. I mean, in the early years, it was a lot of where my stress came from and all this stuff is like so much easier nowadays. It's like, it was infrastructure. Like I was running all the service going down. It was like DDoS attacks and there was no cloud flare.

And, you know, I mean, you just, I just like be writing scripts to try and update the load balancer to hopefully get the thing back on. It was just, and it's just madness. And it's like, and I'm waking up. I'm the one waking up. with the pings on my phone at any given hour and it's real. And, you know, fine, I have five people on a team, but the other four don't know how to fix it. And they're also not responding in one-minute response times.

Like, I'm going to do it any hour of the day. And after, you know, 10 more years of that, I'm like, I don't know if it's worth it, right? You're like, I don't know if it's worth it. Or I think there are moments around, look, when the team is much smaller, not even when the team is bigger. But when the team is much smaller, you know,

one, two, three people leave, one person leaves and their two, three friends leave. And it's like, it's a 15 person. And it's like, oh my God, a whole portion of this company left. Right. And it can feel really, I can feel really awful. It's destabilizing. It's destabilizing.

People like, what am I doing here? They're quitting on you, right? They're basically voting with their feet that I don't want to be here. I don't want to do this. And then some friends of theirs leave and all that. I had some really dark moments around that. And I ended up realizing that it was actually so good. because it cleaned out the personalities that didn't want to be there.

If they were just there because they liked one person, you shouldn't be at the company. And I know there's a bit more to that in the sense that, you know, most people's experience at a company is about their experience with their manager. They can like me all they want or not like me, but if they've got a manager that's awful, they're going to leave. It doesn't matter what the mission is. So, you know, but. So interesting.

The personnel stuff was just really hard. Those are such acute moments. and I have had founders call me, you know, people have invested in, you know, basically in tears. My CTO just resigned. Yeah, what the hell am I going to do? How am I going to explain it to people? How am I going to explain to people that this person that I went to my board and fought for their comp package is leaving 18 months later? Yep.

It's shame. You have shame. You have, you're distraught because you feel like it took six months to find them. I mean, I think it's, you're personally hurt. You're personally hurt. It's like a divorce or something, you know, I think for, I haven't been through one. but I've seen them up close, and man, it's just painful. And people forget, services used to go down,

and they sometimes would go down for days, and Twitter, people thought Twitter was going to fail and go out of business because they couldn't keep the servers up, because right before that, I think you are old enough to remember this, Friendster and MySpace basically died because they couldn't keep the servers up. That was going to be my next question to you, actually.

Can you recall the last company actually died due to real technical problems? And those are the ones that come to mind from me. me. Yeah, I mean, the reason Facebook store... And you think of any other ones? Well, I mean, I'll, I'm going to give it some more thought here, but I do think the reason Facebook worked so well was I can remember the days where Friendster was down and people would

go to MySpace or MySpace was down, people would go over to Friendster. Like, they literally would just have the same friend groups and they were kind of load balancing between the two. And they were down for a while. They could down for two days. Yeah, it's not like 15 minutes. It would be rebuilding the index. We're rebuilding the database.

It was just like, sorry to give you a PTSD, but... Oh, yeah, you're going to. I mean, the other... I mean, the other... You feel it in your throat. I mean, the other scary... Again, it's always infrastructure. You know, another rough moment for Squarespace

was during Hurricane Sandy. Oh, right. Where our primary data, our only data center was downtown. And all, you know, and... Salt water in the basement? Yep, the whole basement. And that's where the fuel tank was. And so when the power...

Yeah. And so it flooded the fuel tank, and we couldn't get fuel into the... the day. So I walk down to the data center because the guys who run data center remember this guy Mike and because I install all the servers and I'm like Mike, what's going on?

And he's like, we're going to run. You got to shut down. And I remember being like, okay, go to the roof to see how much fuel we have. Everyone else in the data center shuts down. I don't because I'm there. I'm telling my people, don't shut down. I actually see the fuel level. And so then we got all this power because everyone else shut off and I didn't.

So now it extended the runway. And we ended up taking fuel up the stairs to save the thing. Yeah, it's a crazy story. It's for another time. But the, I mean, but that was the last time

I was like, I am so screwed. It's going to go down for days. Well, I mean, there was no power below 14th Street or something or I don't know for this canal.

For days, right? That was a week. But even worse than that, it was by building, right? So some buildings, infrastructure was so damaged. I mean, our data system was like condemned?

Like, are data since condemned? Like, you can't go in? Like, what does this mean? Not safe for humans. Not safe for humans. Yeah, I mean, flood it.

I mean, so that was crazy. Like, we're obviously. But all that, it's interesting. All that pain and suffering led other entrepreneurs, whether it's Rackspace or, you know, AWS and to build an infrastructure layer that was redundant, that dealt with denial of service and all of these issues. Yeah. Yeah.

My lord, is it different now? I mean, it's so different. How much of the initial money that you took from your parents went to servers? Oh, almost all of it. Almost all of it, right? That was what you needed the money for. That's the one thing I couldn't do. Right? I could like fake a

I mean, the things I couldn't do were I couldn't do the server, obviously some of the legal setup, but you just do the minimal stuff. And then, you know, I can code, do the infrastructure, do the marketing. I can do all that stuff to varying levels of what a provisioning. I can't do vector arts. I couldn't draw the logo.

So I went and bought a logo. Nice. Nicely done. It used to be, when I was doing Weblog Sync and we're doing Engadget, Autoblog, joystick, it was a website. I don't know if it was 99 designs or some other one. That's one.

That was one. And there was one way you would do a design competition. And I was like, this is great. I put up a $200 logo contest. And I get all of these, you know, things. And then I give some feedback. And then they would do it. And I got in so much trouble with the design community because they said something nice about this on my blog.

And they were like, no, you're supposed to pay $10,000 for a logo. And I was like, I don't have, I'm negative 10,000 on my credit cards at Weblogs. I think I was like literally negative. Oh, my God, Scorespace. I mean, we, you know, look, we're big fans as a design community. We want to build tools for them. We, you know, all that. At some point, we launched a

simple logo creation tool, Squarespace logo, and somebody who is writing the copy wrote the copy in a way that insinuated. It replaces a professionally designed logo, which it does not, and that's not right. And I just, like, didn't read, I don't know. I didn't read the copy closely enough. And it was like, outrage.

Like, how could they pop? And I was like, that's not what I, that was a mistake. Not what we're doing here. And it was like, I was like, I was like, guys, if you saw the number of logo, the stuff on Squarespace websites, you would realize that the alternative to a professionally designed logo isn't that. It's somebody screwing up completely and or not having a logo at all. You have to bring up the bottom.

It's not replacing the top. I mean, no. Getting a logo designed, I think is about the, um, process. of thinking and being thoughtful about what your brand stands for and talking to a designer. It's very important. About how to manifest that

in an emotional way with an object of art. Yeah. That's different than somebody setting up their blog for the first time or their, you know, iPhone case website

where they want to sell iPhone cases and they just need to throw something up and they have no money to spend. And look, there's tons of use cases on Squarespace where someone would never buy a professional logo because it's like a project or like a, you know,

Non-profit, like not a non-profit, like a, like a teacher's group for your school or something. We don't get a professional logo design. What are you talking about? Like, but you need something to sit there on the site. So, you know. What do you think about Canvas business at all? I know obviously watching what Patreon did, watching Shopify success, other folks. You know, it's informed a little bit of the new mission, which, you know, everything to sell anything is such a great tagline, by the way. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. on CNBC. Everything to sell anything, just, like, I remember it. That's amazing.

That's a good sign for, you know, because it used to be Squarespace, make a beautiful website or something. Yeah, or it does build it beautiful. There was a million different ones. You know, make it. Yeah. And it's like, everything to sell anything is just crisp. I don't know if you wrote it or that was with a communications company.

It's our incredible creative team and incredible head of creative. So, no, we do that. Everything to sell anything is great. It's great. It really describes what you're doing. And it's the positioning because everyone wants to say, oh, it's of Shopify. Yeah, some part of it is. Sure. But there's so much more to it. Yes. You're not just selling things that are going to come in a brown box. Correct. Now, what about Canvas business,

though? Because creating objects and art, what they've done is obviously amazing. And they have a natural path to do a little bit of hosting. Are you building or thinking about their building tools and, you know, is that as a potential project? Well, in our product suite right now, we've got two things. By the way, Canva, great job, amazing traction. Amazing. Amazing. Inside Unfold, there's studio tools that let you do some creation. Obviously, it also works for stories.

And as part of our product launched the other day, we launched a product called Squarespace Video Studio, which it's kind of, I knew the word magical gets overused. But you can point it at the content on your site and it actually creates video assets for you that look pretty good. And I said that because like When the thing was pitched internally I was like, I don't believe you It's not going to work. You know, and you know, they created something great there.

And video assets are incredibly difficult for people to create and to have a simple tool that's part of your Squarespace plan and lets you do that. I think it's good. So we're attacking, you know, I would say image and video asset creation separately. It's something we're interested in. So yeah, we'll see more from us there.

I am there was a great product you have you made an app back in the ever note no taping time period it was like a weekend project oh no called Squarespace note oh god I was addicted I'm addicted I oh my god and it was like triggering me it was so great I think you and I were the three people like amongst the three people who love it yeah yeah yeah you could type a note swipe up and it would email it to you or put it into your whatever you could sink it with anything

And it was so elegant and simple. I used it for, I don't know, five years. I loved it. I used it a hundred million times a day every day of my life. And now I have another app. Like I found some app that did something similar. My team, it was like, it was like mutiny. They're like, Anthony, this doesn't fit into the product.

How does this deal with? And I was like, no, guys, you don't understand. It's an ideation narrative. And ideas start somewhere. And then they grow up in the websites and domains. And this is how people can. I was like trying my hardest to just. to buy.

And they're like, we don't care. No. And I'm like, it's true. And they're like, we can't devote resources. I'm like, resources. It's a simplest. It's a simplest. It's a simple.

It's just like, you know what? I'm done the fight. I'm done to fight. Like, it's less than one person's time, but I'm not, I'm not. This is when you know, I'm not going to fight this fight. I'm not going to fight. You know you've built a good organization is when the people around you can tell you when you're off mission, right?

And say like, hey, Anthony, I know that you think this is on mission. They may, they may. They may have had to tell me 40 times. It's founder privilege. All right. Wrapping up. Tell me why a direct listing, why not a traditional, why not a staff, why not stay private? Take me through your decision making process.

I think the stay private one's pretty easy, which is it just feels like we're just going to do these endless private rounds at what is quote unquote a discount to the public markets. but you know it just it's a lot of um it's a lot of work sometimes they come together really nicely sometimes you really struggle and everyone's always then what's the next step how are we getting out how is the public and blah blah blah and it's just this loop of a conversation and unless you're willing to i think buy out who's in there and they want to do a slow buyout or something people need liquidity at some point and the only way out of that again it's to buy them out or go public or you're like MailChimp who you just referenced, which is under

no impetus to do anything. So why direct versus SPAC versus traditional? If Bill Gurley have any impact on you or watching Spotify, be so successful? He definitely reached out and was very pleased with our decision. The traditional because again, we didn't need

primary. Right. You didn't need more money. We didn't really need more money. Now we did do a primary round before going out to sort of like level set, get some other investors in who we would hopefully buy more. So, but we sort of did it on our terms very, very rapidly. And we didn't need to, we didn't need to do it via another mechanism. I liked the no lockup thing.

Yeah, most of it was just around not needing the raise primary and just like, yeah, let's just flip over, you know? And, you know, I knew that would be chaotic. Maybe, maybe it's a little more chaotic than I thought it would be. Has it been? Yeah, I mean, but what's, what's, what's, interesting is every, you know, you really got to have a nuanced take, I think, when making this decision for any company, because as you know, a SPAC has been ideal for certain companies that,

you know, are less known quantities. I mean, we're such a, in my opinion, easy to understand business. It's a lot of predictable where it's been around for a long time. So I just didn't see the reason for the SPAC. And yeah, I mean, the other thing that keep in mind, I think for people who are maybe considering these different options is, you know, companies have very different ownership structures. I mean, some people have a zillion people under a cap table. They've got 20 different outside investors. I mean, Squarespace is very, and all this is public, of course,

because you can look at our cap table on an S-1. But, I mean, you know, I'm still a larger shareholder, and then you've got index, General Atlantic, and Excel, each with big positions. And then, you know, everyone else, the acquired companies, all the employees and everything else. but that's unique, right? Yeah.

That's pretty weird. Usually you see more participants, stuff like it. Now, some more were in there as of that primary round that we did before going public, but it's interesting. It's interesting. Anyway, there's more to that. And so so far enjoying being public, or has it been a distraction for the employees in you? Because it's been six months, I think, right? Kind of right around there.

Yeah, just under six months. May 19, June July. June, July, August, September, October. Yeah, just under six months. Under six months. Four months. It's recent. Look, it's certainly probably weird for people who have only experienced straight up

into the right with Squarespace. Maybe not going up into the right as much as they want, but always up into the rights. They've never seen anything go down at all. They've definitely never seen it, you know, on a day-to-day basis. Earnings calls and whatnot's new. I'm trying to figure out why it's going up, why it's going down, all this stuff. It's like, guys, there are meta-games at play here that are so weird with hedge-to-day

funds and whatnot and retail and volume that are just... It's out of your control. It's totally different. It's a totally different world. And I know it's just super cliche, but it has to work itself out over the long round. Yeah. No, I mean, it's a...

Because it goes down, you're just creating opportunities when people see the... As price, it goes up, people are going to sell and take profit. I mean, it's just going to keep doing that. You look at any... I point people at any of their favorite tech companies, stocks that have been public for three years. Go peak the trough, peak to trough, peek to trough, look, up 20, down 30, up 20, down 40. Like, it's a, it's all over the place.

I mean, the first couple of years of Facebook were, I think, the scariest for a lot of Facebook investors who sold out at $20 a share. Yeah. You know, a lot of them I know. And, you know, they were just like, this is too scary for me. I can't be in a, it's worth $20 to share, $18 a share. I can't do it. And they literally cleared their positions at $18 a share.

Yeah, somebody referenced that the other day and they're like, everyone forgets about Facebook's early, you know, a couple years. And then the other thing I pointed people to, I think people just see that like the whole public company thing is some sort of like, like weird ending, which I just can't. You know what I mean? People call it an exit, right? They call them that.

Some people say it's an exit. I'm like, it's a beginning, guys. And look at these other companies that you love. Do a five-year view on their stock. If they do really well, they're going up thousands of percent. I mean, you can crush it. I mean, all the stuff that Apple did. that you love. They did it while they were public, guys.

Like, you know, I mean, think about that. The iPhone, I mean, they existed before the iPhone. Yes, it's all after they were public. And so, you know, it's a financial event. It puts us on a cadence that says, hey, every quarter, rightly or wrongly, short term or whatever, you're going to be judged for how you did. And if you did well, you're going to go up a bit. If you did poorly, you're going to go down a bit.

And none of that's permanent if you can continue to do a good job. and there's no like next question of like, well, when are we going private? You know, when are we going double public? Like, it's, this is just a steady state now. Steady state. Just go to work. All right, listen, man. Just go back to work.

Congratulations. Thanks for supporting the show over the years. It's been great to know you. And I'll look forward to sitting in your courtside seats when we, when I come off of the Knicks game. Do you still got the logo on the Knicks or no? Yeah, yeah. We renewed for.

So they, they treat you well when you go there. You must be baller when you go there. They're somewhat nice to me. I believe due to the whole money component of this. Yes. They're very nice to me. So I will. I'll be inviting myself to go to a game with you.

Oh, that would be hilarious. Well, I went to the two playoff games last year because it was the first time they were in the playoffs in a long time. It was absolutely wonderful because people forget. Like, that was when vaccines all hit a certain amount. And they let us. You were there when they let us sit in the lower bowl with no masks? So they were, I was there on one of the playoff games that was like, full vaccine, you know.

And it was like, it was incredible. The energy was too full. The Knicks are winning. The Knicks are a great team again. And New York is back. Yes. And we're going to have a life post-pendemic. It was a real, it was a real moment.

It was a real feeling. I was so emotional to be in there with no mask on and saying, you know what? There is going to be life after the pandemic. Yeah. Are you going to bring everybody back to the office? Because you had a great office culture. Oh, yeah. Definitely.

Definitely. You know, and by the way, I'm in New York right now. New York feels great. I, you know, anyone's saying like this New York's dead. No, New York doesn't die. It just goes through seasons. They're out of the, what's a what? New York doesn't die.

It can have seasons, right? And the rebirth, when New York, when I came up in New York in the 90s, I'm just slightly older than you, it was fucking great that New York was a little bit in the dumps because I was able to live in a loft, a commercial loft, and nobody cared. It was lawless. Yeah. I got to New York in 06. Yeah, it's only a little after.

Yeah, no, and that's when it was like, okay, everything's got to be formalized, yada, yada, you can't break the law, you can't live in a commercial loft. And now I understand it's a little loosey-goosey, people are staying in the park too late, I get it. But it's a, now artists can live in Manhattan again, right? It's raw. I'm not sure if we're there yet.

Yeah, but like, I mean, it does feel a little bit. It feels more raw. I mean, which I personally like. In terms of the office, so I was, I'm in the office right now. We're in our podcast studio. and I was here yesterday. We were doing a toast for our product launch and everything to sell anything positioning.

And we had 180 people here. Wow. And we didn't force, we're not forcing anyone to come in. It's more pull versus push. Yeah. And, you know, everybody was talking to, they're just like, oh, I forgot how great this was.

I was like, yeah, we get energy. We're social creatures. We get energy being around people we like. I like the people I work with. And like, people are like so surprised. It's like, yeah, it's better than like sitting home alone all the time. What are you thinking? And so we're doing the, everyone's required to do a vaccine to come into the office,

which is sort of a no-brainer for us. We did a survey. 90% of people did it by themselves without us asking. Yeah, these are well-educated people. Yeah. So, I mean, it was like through the roof. And so it's like, okay, sorry, the last 10% are you going to have to do this. And then, look, I mean, we were always.

we were never a rigid work culture. We were never, you have to be in five days, you're getting in a nine and you're clocking out of five and we're tracking every hour. No, it was always somewhat flexible. We always had some portion

of the employees that were remote. The company, we acquired acuity, they're all remote. So it's not like we had no remote employees. So we'll have some more. You know, it's not like we had an inflexible schedule before. Okay, we'll have some more.

Okay, we'll start drawing people back. Okay, we'll start turning on the office services. And eventually there might be a bit more of a push at some point. But, you know, I don't think it wasn't so inflexible before is all I would say. People needed to pick their kids up or, you know, they weren't feeling well and wanted to work the morning from home. Like nobody is going to begrudge me. You still have that beautiful space because you loaned me your space for when I had my book party and somebody interviewed me. It was great.

Yeah, the one down in the West Village. Yeah. I mean, what a beautiful space you had. Yes, yes, I remember that you did your book pretty year. Yeah, yeah, I'm in it now. Yeah, I'm in a podcast video within it, but yeah. Thank you for that. That was incredibly nice of you. It's nice to have friends.

I was just like, I emailed you and I was like, hey, I'm going to do a book thing. Do you don't have any space. You know, I'll use my space for free. We'll put food out. I was like, oh, dude, so nice of you. Yeah, you know, taking the space, taking the Nix tickets. I mean, what's there, Jason? What can I take you?

I'll take you out. I'll take you out. I got a good, you like Peking Duck. I got a good Peking Duck Place in New York. Have you ever been to Red Farm Decoy? I love Red Farm Decoy. That is one of my, oh, my God. Oh, my God.

I love the whole Jewish Chinese. He's got like these dumplings with, is it brisket in him or corned? Oxtail? No, it's Pistrami Egg roll. It's Pistrami Egg roll. That's it. The Pistrami Eggro is off the charts. And then I, you know, I always reserve at Red Farm Decoy, the Peking Duck, which is

It's just extraordinary. It's just such a great place. Yeah, let's do that. You get the tickets, I'll get the Peking. I think it's a fair trade, right? I think it's kind of a fair. It depends on it. It feels fair. I mean, it's... It's a cost. It's a pastrami egg roll. I mean... It's a pastrami egg roll. We're in.

Amazing. All right, brother. Continued success. Congratulations and everything, and I look forward to seeing you on the other side of the pandemic. Awesome. Thanks for inviting me back. All right. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.