This Week in Startups - Facebook’s Oversight Board rules on Trump ban plus how to reverse engineer TAM & more | E1211

Episode Date: May 7, 2021

Jason covers the Facebook Oversight Board's decision on Trump (15:49), gives a potential solution for bad actors on social media that are of public consequence (39:25), provides a concrete way to reverse engineer TAM (55:00), and more!

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Remember back in January when I did. drop that emergency pod on Facebook, sending their decision for Donald Trump to go to the oversight board, and I explained what the oversight board was. Well, here we are. It's three and a half months later, and we finally have the ruling. Shockingly, or maybe not shockingly, they upheld Trump's ban, but for another six months. And they passed the ball back to Facebook and told them that they need to make the call. I kid you not. Now, we knew that this oversight board was filled with intellectuals who take the job seriously. We knew that this was going to be a very considered group of people.

And I said as much in my summary, which I'll play for you right now. I think that that is what Zuckerberg is trying to do here. He wants to take these edge cases and push them out to this board of respected people who he has paid off with generous salaries. I am sure, and use their credibility. And of course, they get to power trip and cash the check. So that is probably a good trade of services. He's buying their reputations. They need to maintain their reputations.

These are pretty serious people on the board, obviously the former prime minister of Denmark. And if you hire those people and you give them independence and then you were to take it away, oh my lord, the blowback would be significant. So this is something that I think probably Zuckerberg has thought about deeply. He doesn't want to be hated. He doesn't want to have to make these decisions. he wants to hand them off and say, you know what? It's a difficult decision, and I agree I shouldn't have this much power. So therefore, please don't break up Facebook.

Please don't, you know, rescind the 2.30, you know, common carrier type protections where, you know, the person who makes paper doesn't get blamed for what people write on the piece of paper. That's Facebook's position. We're a piece of paper. You write stuff on a piece of paper or you use a Bick pen. The pen and the paper are not responsible for what's written on the paper. If you write, I want to rob this bank on a piece of paper and using a BIC pen, BIC does not become responsible for it. If you get away in a Volvo car, they don't charge Volvo with your bank robbery escape. So this seems like a good idea.

You know, it's going to be hard to game this. They're not going to be able to do everything. But I think this will create a framework of independent, intellectual, good faith discussions. And I think that this is a way to cozy up to lawmakers and say, hey, we take what we're doing seriously and we are acting in good faith. Finally, after 20 years of bad behavior, we are now. going to start behaving ourselves. Okay. So as I said in, you know, my take on the oversight board, this is a way for Zuckerberg to say to politicians, to say to the world, Americans, government

regulators in Europe, all the people who have their scalples out and in some cases they're cleavers and they're ready to chop, chop, chop, or scalpel, scalpel, scalpel, and, you know, a thousand cuts to Facebook, maybe detach a limb or two here and Instagram, here or WhatsApp here. Facebook is under the microscope. Any company that becomes as powerful, obviously should be. It doesn't mean it should be broken up, but it definitely should face scrutiny. I think we all agree on that. This is something that is obvious to everybody. When a company gets very big and it impacts a lot of people, we should as a society, as individuals, and yes, even our governments, which at times can be dysfunctional, we should take a look at it and say, is this a net positive for

society and competition still exist and is it having some impact on society that is acute and needs to be addressed immediately or should they be monitored and throttled, right? There's so many different ways to handle this. And Trump is the ultimate trolley car problem. And if you don't know what the trolley car problem is, thankfully you didn't have to go for a philosophy degree or sit with people who have them. But it basically means trolley car is coming down the road. It's got two choices. It can kill a 90-year-old or it can kill three, five-year-olds. Who should it kill? Or it's going to kill five-90-year-olds or one, you know, five-year-old.

And you've got to make some argument in your class about how the 90-year-old had a full life and yada, yada, yada. It's the Kobe Ache Maru if you are Star Trek nerds, an unwinnable problem. So Trump has lost his own social media page, which is basically like a short form WordPress blog. and there's really no social in it. He basically discovered blogging. Obviously, you know, he's a savant when it comes to media, lying, capturing attention, starting fights, and so many other things. But he is not a technological savant.

If he was, he would have just recreated Twitter. If you want to take a whole deep dive into my original thoughts, episode 1164, it's in the description, et cetera. So let's take a quick refresher on why Trump was banned, because, I think a lot of times in our very charged environment, we forget what actually happened and we need to just pause for a second and remember why this happened, as opposed to just jumping to partisan fights and slam dunking on each other, whether it's, you know, should people have to show their driver's license when they vote or, you know, what happened on January 6th.

And here we go. Brief timeline of events. And by the way, just for context here, Facebook's, Trump's Facebook account was at like 33 million likes and 35 million followers. So it was up there in terms of importance to him as much as Twitter. And of course, Facebook is, let's just say, maybe Twitter skews a little more elitist, probably a little higher educated, maybe a little more urban and city centers on coast. cities, in other words, the Democratic, and perhaps Facebook, if you look at the top trending stories yesterday, like one, two, and three were Ben Shapiro, so it sort of tells you all you need to know. So, January 6th, the Capitol riots occurred. Some people want to call it an insurrection.

That might be a little overblown and a weird framing since there was no chance for them to overthrow the U.S. government. And some people said it was just a protesters having fun. That's obviously downplaying it. I think we can all agree with that framing, can't we? And we can wind up somewhere in the middle, which is, yeah, these people were violent rioters combined with idiots who were protesters who were taking it too far. But this was a very scary moment. And if you can ascertain if this was a riot, just by doing this quick mental exercise, would you want your child there? Would you want your mom or dad there? Would you want to be there? Would you want to be there? as these lunatics were breaking windows and throwing, you know, beating people with fire stingers

and any number of devices. Of course, nobody would want to be in the middle of that. Therefore, it was not a protest. It was a riot. And there is no chance that a bunch of, you know, forever Trumpers are overthrowing the government, certainly not 10,000 of them. If they really wanted to take it to the mat, they would have been wiped out very quickly. So it's a riot. We all agree. So throughout the day, Trump continued to post to Facebook and Twitter until the platforms very reasonably said, oh my lord, they're breaking the windows of the Capitol. There are guns drawn. This is a seriously dangerous situation. When the guns come out, you know, if you have anybody in your family in law enforcement, you know taking a gun out is a very, very serious decision

for a police officer. And in fact, it's so serious that that's the police officer. And in fact, it's so serious that the police officers who were cornered and overwhelmed and being beaten would not take their guns out because they know and they're trained. When you take those guns out, now it's a whole different level. And that's how brave those police officers were. They're so goddamn brave that they didn't take their guns out. They took the beating rather than killing those deranged sociopathic forever Trumpers who were going to break the windows. And it has nothing to do if you voted for Trump. You could be a Trump voter and not be a deranged lunatic who loves Trump so much that you've got to break the windows. Just like a Bernie Sanders person might do the same thing, right?

There's deranged people on both sides. Who knows what percentage? There's no way to know that. Are you getting sick and tired of these cloud wars, aren't we all? It's time to forget about credits and cut your bills in half and get amazing customer support. It's time to grow your business with Linode. If you've been in the industry for over 10 years, you know Linode, because you're old school, and you know how great their service is,

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Just join Linode's startup program and receive free infrastructure credits and, most importantly, a free, consultation. Visit Linode, L-I-N-O-D-E dot com slash twist, Linode.com slash twist to apply and start growing your business today. Cut that bill in half and redeploy that capital on another developer, kind bars, or new laptops, whatever you need. Okay, let's get back to this amazing program. So, 140 people were injured in this, you know, on all different sides. But tragically, five people died. And I think that's where we just have to stop, you know, just take a moment. A capital police officer Brian Sicknick. He succumbed to his injuries after the riot. Ashley Babett, who is an Air Force vet, she's the one I've talked about on this show in the All In podcast multiple times who jumped through

the window. She was so deranged. She was so enraged that she literally, when people said, there's a gun, there's a gun. She still went through the window. And this is an army vet. This is an incredibly incredible tragedy. She was incensed to the point that she was, She jumped through a window with a gun facing her and she was killed. And you never want to see somebody killed. But obviously, if you're that deranged, those police officers, I mean, there's no good shooting, but that was not a bad shooting. In other words, the police officer did what had to be done.

If he had not shot that person and a hundred people came in there and, you know, murder Nancy Pelosi or, you know, whoever, whoever happened to be on the side of those doors and we don't actually know, boy, would that have been just absolutely tragic? And protesters, Kevin Greenson, Roseanne Boylant, Benjamin Phillips also passed away from various elements, heart attack stroke and being crushed by the mob. I mean, just tragic. Five Americans dead. And this, for me, I think, makes it very clear that what Trump did was incite this.

And obviously Giuliani and, you know, all of Trump's kids, all, you know, in all caps, said on January 6th, the Republican Party, and more importantly, our country needs the presidency more than ever before. The power of the veto stays strong. And then Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and constitution, giving states a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent and inaccurate ones, which they were asked to previously certify. U.S. demands the truth. Gosh, the whole thing, you know, gets whipped up and whipped up, and he tells people he's going to walk down. you know, Pennsylvania Avenue Avenue with them. It's obvious that they would not have done

what they did had they not been egged on by Giuliani Trump and the whole cohort. So January 7th, and just, I'm not some big historian here, but this is the first time that the capital was breached since the British attacked in the war of 1812. So it's just absolutely disgusting turn of events, a horrible moment for America. No matter what, who you vote for, no American. No Americans want to see Americans kill each other. This is unacceptable, unnecessary, and just absolutely abhorrent. Period. End of story. But what's most abhorrent is that people's motivation in an organization, whether it's a country or your startup or anything in between, you know, the attitude emanates from the top. You know, if you're a hustler and your startup, people are going to hustle. If you are a, you know, hey, let's be balanced and, you know, lead a balanced lifestyle and namaste, we should all. all do yoga, you know, you're going to attract those people, keep those people and remove people from your organization who are not in that culture. This is how culture works. And there's nothing wrong with that. But when you're at the top, you have an obligation to behave a certain way

and you own to a certain extent the behaviors of the people who you influence. And, you know, some people might disagree with me on that, but I do think a reasonable person would say the CEO and the country or the company does to have accountability. not 100% accountability. It can be lone wolves, but has some amount of accountability. And in this case, he egged it on. And Zuckerberg just on January 7th, that enough. They're banning Trump accounts indefinitely.

Citing the risk, Trump posed for a peaceful transition of power. And if you put yourself back at that time, I don't know if you remember that. You know, for two years we had this, is Trump going to actually leave office or not? and all these hysterical folks on the left were saying this, and I thought they were being hysterical, and they actually turned out to be right. He was not committed to the peaceful transition of power, and he literally said, like, we'll see. But like, are you going to commit to, you know, accept the election results? And he was like, we'll see. I got that one wrong. I'll be totally honest. I did never thought that he would egg something like this on. And so maybe that's a fault of my own.

I should have believed the historical left on that one. And so the vice president of integrity at Facebook Guy Rosen and Monica Bickert, who's VP of Global Policy Management, put out a statement. We believe the risks of allowing the president to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great. Therefore, we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete. I'm not sure anybody except for the forever Trumpers can disagree with their decision there.

And if you're running a business, ask yourself, and I always like to put myself in the other person's shoes, whether it's Trump shoes or Biden's shoes or Zuckerberg shoes or these vice presidents. I think what a vice president on Facebook and even Zuckerberg are thinking and Jack at Twitter is what if he does it again? And instead of five people dying, 50, 500, or 5,000 die. That seems farcical to say, oh, 500 people could die. It does seem farcical until you have five people die. And now the jump is not a jump of zero to one. It's a jump of five to 50 or 50 to a 500. And we all know the difference between those things. So Trump basically handed his own demise to the social media platforms. So Facebook on January 21st sent their Trump decision

to the oversight board for a complete and final ruling. Before we go over the ruling, we do need to, again, look at what the oversight board is because I think this is one of the most fascinating things that Zuckerberg has done in his career. And he's not a fascinating guy. I mean, he's a kind of a duplicating machine, as you've heard me say many times in this program. He's one of the least creative people I've met in my career of 30 years in technology. And in fact, I would say, of any of the major successful people, he is the least inspiring, least ethical, least inspiring, least ethical and least creative, least original thinker. I mean, it's like talking to him is like talking to your least interesting friend. But what he does do very well is copy other people's

ideas, do them better, and scale them. So he does have a brilliance in that zone, which we can debate if that zone is loathsome or virtuous. You know where I stand on that. So Zuck first mentioned the idea of an independent oversight board back in November 2018. I've increasingly come to believe that Facebook should not make so many important decisions about free expression and safety on our own. I didn't do that in the Saturday Live voice. I'm not mocking him.

I'm just saying it an intellectual voice, obviously. And the board was created to rule on just basically tricky content issues. as hate speech or the decision to ban a world leader, right? Because there is a debate to be had here. Should we allow Kim Jong-un or, you know, somebody in the Middle East who, you know, somebody from Iran to just go onto a platform and say Israel should be wiped off the map or, you know, this group of people are dogs and these people should be, you know, annihilated. do we want them to say that? Well, there is a group of people who argue, yes, let them expose their absolute insane world beliefs so that the world can see it and then act accordingly. There are other people who are saying, hey, you know, if this person's allowed to say that, that's going to hurt people's feelings.

It might encourage other people to think that way. I tend to like knowing who the real bad guys are and gals. And I err on the side, and I did err on the side of it being a little ridiculous to ban Trump. And I said as much many times, like banning the President of the United States is ridiculous. And, you know, banning other world leaders, I think, is also a little bit ridiculous unless, unless what they're doing is inciting violence. That's where I personally draw the line and say, well, that's a no-brose. or we don't want them using these tools to murder people or have people harmed. So the board itself is designed to be really independent.

They can't be overturned by Mark Zuckerberg or the Facebook Corporation. So in December 2019, Facebook announced an initial commitment of $130 million to launch the oversight board and funded for up to six years. It's unclear how much they each get. I don't think it's like a full-time job, but there are full-time employees. there. But to give you an idea of what $130 million means, certainly that is a lot to all of us. But Facebook is on $100 billion run rate. They spend more money on food every year, I'm certain, for their employees. So this is nothing. The board has 20 members. It plans to have 40 when they're fully staff. The first four

members were chosen by Facebook, and then the initial four then chose the rest. And Facebook pays all those board member salaries. which are in fact undisclosed, I would put it at 100 grand, 200 grand, basically, you know, not, and they're not full time, so they average about 15 hours a month. So I would put it as like, whatever they get for a speaking gig,

maybe something in that zone. So a speaking gig for this level of person is $25,000. So if they got, you know, some approximation of that for every month or two, I put it in that zone. So I could see 250K at the $1,000. at the high end or 100,000 at the low end per year.

In other words, it's a good gig, but it's not money-changing life. In other words, they're not being bought off. So it's probably in the zone of generous but not outrageous compensation. That's just a guess. And it's $130 million over six years. So that means $21 million a year or $21.x. So 21,040 people. if half the money goes to staff and half went to the people there, you know, we're sort of getting

into that zone. The board's ruling on Trump. So now you know how the board is constructed. But my bestie, David Sacks, had a tweet about this. He responded to a person named Nick Confessor. I hope I'm pronouncing that correct. The fact that this private corporate administrative decision is being covered as something akin to the Supreme Court ruling, rightly so, I think, is the best illustration I can imagine of the sheer power Facebook has achieved over the public square. Undoubtedly correct, says my bestie, David Sachs. However, the real Supreme Court applies the Constitution and Bill of Rights, whereas Facebook Supreme Court is a fig leaf for the whims of oligarchs, oligarchs being Zuckerberg. Leaving our First Amendment rights to their interpretation is an

intolerable state of affairs. This is a great thought bomb by David. I think what is missing here and the counter argument most people would say is it's a private company. So previously David Sachs's position and most conservatives position was private company can do what they want. Private company, yes, to decide who they serve. No shirt, no shoes, no service, as the canonical example. But David Sachs has evolved this position and he's talked about it on the All-In podcast and we've talked about it until 3 o'clock in the morning, many a night at poker games where hey, maybe we need to have somebody in government thinking about this since the elections and these platforms are, you know, kind of basically how we communicate today. So it's different

than a local pizzeria or the canonical example of the bakery in the South that's owned by a Christian couple who doesn't want to put, you know, Adam and Steve on the top of their cake, right? Oh, my God, you know, they're bigots, they're homophobes. Should we, shut their bakery down, should we force them to put two guys or two ladies on a cake? You know, and most conservatives are like, let's not even fight over this. It's their business. There's other places you can get cakes. For me, I kind of find it really offensive on a human rights level, and I might think differently about it if I'm being totally honest. But I do think when something impacts, you know, a billion, two billion, three people on a billion on the planet, it's different

than a bakery, right? The actual impact. If you're thinking logically, which I know for a lot of people, they're absolutists. Like everybody has to, you know, buy into a worldview. But if you're thinking in a practical way, the impact that Facebook has is different than that baker. And again, to be clear,

I'm not cool with a bakery, not making a cake for a gay couple. That I find super, super offensive and just wrong on so many just levels. Growing your business takes more than offering a popular product or service. That's important, but it takes more than that.

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No strings attached. They know you're going to love it. Once you get that first hire and you see how easy, peasy, lemon squeasy it is, you're going to go for a second and third. Terms and conditions apply because they're giving yourself. something for free. So here's the official ruling May 5th, 2021, after 3.5 months of deliberation, which actually seems like a fine amount of time for this big of a decision. I thought it would take six months, to be honest. Facebook should uphold the ban for up to six months and make a final

ruling on Trump's account within that time frame, either reinstate his account or deactivate it permanently. Wait, what? Wait, that's not a ruling? That is literally passing the buck. What is happening? This makes no sense. You made a board to make the decision, and they just said, uphold the ban for six months. Okay, I'm with you there.

You made a decision. And then Facebook needs to make the final decision. I thought that's why we're paying you all 100 grand or $200 grand a year, whatever it is. So according to the board, Facebook's original restriction was appropriate, but an indefinite suspension isn't good enough. Why isn't it good enough?

I think the reason it's not good enough is you need to have an explanation. There needs to be a way to get out of the penalty box. If you were to murder somebody, as Trump has frequently pointed out, he could shoot somebody in the face in Fifth Avenue and still his voters were to vote for him. If you were to murder somebody, after 20 years, you would again regain a bunch of rights in society after you paid your dues and went to jail, etc., if that was in fact your sentence. So there needs to be some sort of reconciliation here. Indefinite is a pretty long time. So the excerpt. from the ruling that I think is the most prescient. And applying a vague standardless penalty and then referring this case to the board to resolve,

Facebook seeks to avoid its responsibilities. The board declines Facebook's request and assist that Facebook apply and justify a defined penalty. So Zuckerberg gave them the potato out of the microwave. They caught the potato and were like, this potato is really hot. And they threw it back to Zuckerberg. You can't make this stuff up, people.

So here's some reflections on Twitter, paradoxically, from the Oversight Board's content director, Eli Sugarman. Eli Sugarman, again, he's the Oversight Board's content director. I think that means he publishes and communicates for them. Published a 25 tweet thread on the morning of May 5th, not May of the 4th, be with you, reflecting. on how the board came to a decision. In light of the oversight board's recent decision in the Trump case, I'd like to share a few of reflections and highlight portions of the decision that might not otherwise

attract as much attention as they should. I'll proceed sequentially. Here we go. And he does 15, a 15 point tweets from him. Most of the thread is informative, but it's not super surprising. But there are two tweets that are kind of interesting, perhaps even shocking. The seventh and eight tweets in the thread. By the way, his Twitter handle is Eli Sugarman, E-L-I-Sugarman as in searching for Sugarman in the documentary. And of course, we put everything in pod notes and we put everything in the description for you. So go to bitly.com slash twist notes and you'll see a Notion instance. We started on Notion. We might move it to Rome or maybe even the Wikimedia software. We're kind of experimented. We've done about 20 of these. If you join the team in our Slack or you email

Justin at Launch.co, you can join the team that writes podcast notes, and we give little thank yous for people who do three, four, five of them. And it's kind of fun to do. And we give you credit, most importantly. So you can see just some awesome fans of the show who are like CEOs of their own startups and they're getting social credibility and links to their startup, their Twitter handle to get more followers in exchange. And as a thank you for me to them for helping build out the knowledge base, bitly.com slash twist notes. So here are the two verbatim tweets. there's an understandable tension between the oversight board's desire for extensive information to help with its decision-making and Facebook's desire to keep a case file more focused,

and then in parentheses, and avoid a fishing expedition in quotes. Facebook sometimes declines to answer our questions, so we call them out for that. That's kind of interesting, right? We asked 46 questions if Facebook declined to answer seven entirely and two partially, including, here we go, on whether Facebook have been contacted, pressured by government officials in this case, and questions about the suspension removal of content by other political leaders. So, I can tell you what's going on here. The executives at any company are donating money to hosting fundraisers for engaged with our politicians. What that means is mutual access.

You can be certain that when the riots were going on, that, I'll pick a couple of examples. Nancy Pelosi, Mitt Romney, pick a person on a side, Ted Cruz, have the phone numbers of Bill Gates, Cheryl Sandberg, Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, whoever it happens to be, Tim Cook. They are on a first name basis with these people. They are on speed dial. They collaborate. So when this happened, You can be sure Nancy Pelosi sent a message to the Facebook team saying, hey, are you going to take down Trump's account on Facebook now? And then emailing Jack and his team. And they obviously do not want those conversations to see the light of day because what a can of worm that opens up. I actually don't know where I stand on this.

But what's super interesting about this is we now have an independent board sticking it to the person who created it, which, I guess to some extent proves that they have some level of independence, which is a great thing. Unless the cynic in me immediately thought, I wonder if they are not answering these questions and creating tension to prove the board's independent and to actually start a fight with their own board to create the appearance of a little bit of a battle. Think about that for a second. These people built the largest businesses in the world. they're the most sophisticated people in the world. Is this theater?

Is this bread and circuses? Are we watching gladiators? You and I, the public, is this like they put us in a coliseum and said, here, watch this dog fight and don't worry about the bigger issue that there was this insurrection on January 6th or, more cynically,

that Facebook is becoming absolutely unduly influential and breaking all of our privacy pretty regularly. Hmm, I wonder. I wonder. So, you know, they didn't answer 20% of the questions. I think that's kind of normal when you're in a court case, but here, I think it has to do with probably not wanting to just open up the next can of worms. You send this to 40, well, 20 of the, there's 20 people there now. You send this to 20 people. You think that's going to get leaked? Of course it's going to get leaked. So somebody's going to leak that some executive has a cozy relationship that they worked

in Washington or they were sorority sisters or fraternity brothers with this senator and the whole thing unravels. So here's an interesting take. The Guardian reporter, we're a guardian reporter Carol Codwolder. I hope it produced that correctly, Carol, has some harsh words, not dissimilar to mine while talking to my guy, Carl Cantania. I'm looking at the statement from you today. The decision shows the Oversight Board experiment has failed. Why? Because it's kind of the whole thing has revealed itself

to be a completely pointless charade in that Facebook essentially it set up this body as a PR device. And it did that because it's trying to offload these most difficult decisions it has to make to another body and so that it doesn't have to take responsibility for his platform. And the oversight board, in complete fairness, said, uh-uh, no way, you're actually responsible for this. And so it's punted the decision back to Facebook.

And so it's, you know, it's an extraordinary thing. We've had months and months now of this. And, yeah, Facebook's attempt to just kick it down the line and to make somebody else make these experts take responsibility for it has absolutely failed. And I think they have been really embarrassed and even humiliated a bit in the process, I would say, because I think there's a lot of people not buying it this morning. I think you can see that in the reaction to what's going on. So, yeah, you know, that's a level of candidness from a Brit that you don't always see.

She thinks it's theater as well. She thinks it's all hogwash, and she slags on them pretty hard. NBC news reporter Dylan Beers, I think it's how you pronounce your name, Dylan, had a more charitable take. So many Facebook critics argued the oversight board was just a cover for Facebook and didn't have any real power. What you're seeing now is real power, and that power is denying Facebook its cover. Mark Zuckerberg chose to give OSB this power. He didn't have to keep that in mind. Okay.

I think it's an interesting take. So my closing thoughts, you know, I gave you my sort of meta-analysis already. I always like to think meta-verse, as in meta-verse or just going one layer higher, thinking about thinking, metaconsciousness. And I'm thinking about why Zuckerberg created this and how he's playing chess or how he set up the chess board and the rules, right? So the meta-interpretation is not just how he's playing up the game, but how he set up the rules of the game and who he's let into the game. What does it mean for the future of this oversight board?

Maybe Facebook is absolutely delighted with a little bit of a stalemate and kicking the ball down the road. This might actually be a good outcome because it lets them continue the ban while soliciting feedback and saying to, different governing bodies. Look, these are the smartest people we know. We gave them $130 million

in a six-year mandate and complete independence and they can't figure it out. We can't figure it out. And you don't have any suggestions either. So thanks for bringing me back to Congress, Senator, Congressman. But nobody can figure this out. It's so complex. Maybe he sunsets this after six years? Does he feel like he's going to sunset it? Six years is a long time, but $130 million is inconsequential. I mean, I think, Zuckerberg has bought more land in Kauai, Hawaii, all public. I'm not doxing him by saying he bought it. I mean, this is the cover story of every Hawaiian newspaper right now. I mean, he's literally spent more on real estate on the garden island than he is on the oversight board. So this is not meaningful money. Letting them run around in circles and dance for him. Like, you know, he's the organ grinder and they're the monkey with the tin cup. Like, I hate to say it as cynically as that. But he might be just.

making them his dancing monkeys to dance around and distract. Maybe they let Trump back on, but take away the caps lock? That could be a good solution. Twilio is the cloud communication platform used by Uber, Airbnb, Shopify, and countless others. You may have heard of them back in November of 2020 when they announced their $3.2 billion acquisition of segment one of the world's leading customer data platforms. That adds to their incredible portfolio. which also includes SenGrid.

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Ooh, they made a new domain name for this. Twilio, T-W-I-L-O, startups.com slash twist. Make sure you write this down right now. Twilio's all in when it comes to startups. They love startups and they're helping you grow your business. business, 3,500 right now, Twilio Startups.com slash twist. I actually have my own solution for this, which is what many community pieces of software allow you to do, which is, in six months, I would let Trump back on the platform, but I throttle

them. I throttle them. Right now, did you hear it? Did your neurons fire when I just said that? you ever join a message board and they're like, great, you can do one post a day or you ever get in a chat room on YouTube or something and it says slow down.

You can post again in 140 seconds. You know why we have that rule? Because of people like Trump. Because of trolls. He's a troll. We all know that. It's like his superpower is trolling. He called Rosie O'Donnell fat.

He called a high profile woman a fat pig. Like, this is a person who is, if you open up troll in the dictionary, There's Trump's picture. Like, he defines the category. He's the Michael Jordan of trolling. He's the LeBron James of trolling, Tiger Woods of trolling.

He is awesome and trolling. So, what do you do with trolls? You don't feed the trolls. And you throttle the trolls. So they're not feeding the trolls by banning him. Now, if you want to let him on, he can do for one year, five posts a day. And if there's no problem, then he can do unlimited posts a day. However, in that first year, every post gets reviewed.

Did it just happen again? Did you just feel your neurons fire? It's such an easiest solution, right? It's the easiest possible solution. You basically put Trump on a leash. You throttle him. You review his content. They know what their rules are.

So all they have to say to him is, you're welcome to come back to the platform. You've agreed to be on your best behavior. and not do something like this again. So feel free to tweet all you like. But if you target and harass an individual, if you say something racist, if you incite violence, if you docks somebody,

we know what that looks like. We do it all day long. So we will within one hour of every post you do, have it reviewed and publish it. That would cost. I don't know, what do you do? Put two people in a room and wait for them to tweet. two people pay them an extraordinary salary,

$100,000 a year, $150,000 a year, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. In fact, you can make Trump favorite if he wants to come on the platform so belly. But realistically, put people there. They've already got 10,000 people reviewing tweets, so pick the three best people and say, you're the Trump team.

Trump tweets, if it's innocuous, let it right through. If it's borderline, escalate it to this person, you each give, the three of you each give your vote, yes or no. If all three say no, if all three say, then it's a no. If two out of three say no, get a manager in here, right? And we'll just discuss it.

And we will actually review every single tweet he does, every single post he does, every single YouTube video he does. Until such time, as he proves, he can do a hundred of them or a year, kind of like probation. Put him on probation. Easy, peasy, lemon, squeasy. and you can tell that that's the right answer, right? Because you don't even need the Facebook board for that, this oversight board. You can literally disband the oversight board. If somebody is an important person in society, they abuse the rules, and yeah, maybe there is a justification for a third way.

And so I present to you the third way, not banning, not a free-for-all, but probation. And I tweeted, you know, when I heard this, there is no way Facebook thought the oversight board. would continue the Trump end. Wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerberg rethinks the board and defunds or dispans him in a couple years. I actually don't think he thought that they would come to this conclusion. I think this is like a curveball for him. But an easy one to solve.

So to the oversight board and to Mark Zuckerberg, you're welcome. I just solved your problem. I mean, how do you guys not think of this? Why do I have to solve all your problems? All right, stick with us. I'm going to do an ask Jason after this. This is a question from James. You sent it by email.

Who are your top tech journalist reporters right now? What do you look for in a journalist that you'll follow? How do you weigh tight reporting with writing skills being entertained? Hmm. Quite an interesting question. I think that there is a definitional problem in society. Opinion writers and journalists have now, um, overlapped so much

that when you say reporter and you say opinion writer people don't know the difference so it's so obvious when you read reportage in the New York Times it's just dripping

with a certain point of view now when you watch Fox or MSNBC that's entertainment Tucker Carlson Rachel Maddo they might be have arguments they're making but it's clearly opinion. They're not reporting in the classic sense.

There might be acts of reporting that occur while they're giving their opinion, but they're kind of using reporting as a way to craft an opinion, like we do on the All In Podcasts. Nobody goes to the All In Podcasts and thinks, Oh, Friedberg, Sachs, Chammoth, and Jason spent the day interviewing people

and they wrote a story. It's our opinions based on our knowledge of the industry, some of the firsthand, some of it from reading studies, some of it from looking at charts, etc. So that's at the core of this. There are some folks, you know, Alex from TechCrunch. It's just, you know, he's like an old school reporter in a young guy's body. And I kind of like his approach. You know, my guy John Ford at CNBC, you know, when I do interviews with him or Carl Cantonia,

it feels like, you know, he might ask me a challenging question, but it doesn't feel like he's on one side or the other. He feels like it's going for it. Now, There are other folks, like, let's take a Kara Swisher, who I'm also friendly with. I might even say we're friends. I'm not sure. But we've hung out a lot and we've known each other for decades. So, you know, it's kind of hard in an industry to know if you're colleagues, friends, or friendly. But let's just say I feel friendly and I feel like I have a friendship with her.

I mean, she may feel differently. So I feel like a Kara Swisher is very clearly somebody who was a hardcore, straight down the middle, journalist, but because of podcasting, she still does that hardcore stuff and she still has an opinion. And I really think, like, the Kara Swisher is just a great model because she built up so much credibility for decades as a reporter. I'm not saying she's old. She's not young. It's not a cub reporter, obviously. So she's got, you know, two or three decades of just being a beat reporter in tech. And I believe that gives you the ability to have a sensible opinion. And if you contrast that with somebody polarizing like a tale of Lorenz, you know, she's obviously on Twitter being a millennial spouting off saying all kinds of stupid stuff. And it actually, it shades all of her reporting. So she doesn't get respected by a lot of people because they just see her silly behavior on Twitter. I'll be honest. Like when she says, you know, some of these tweets, they're just not.

consensical and she does too many of them, which I can relate to. A little bit of projection in here. But, you know, to be taking, but I'm not a New York Times reporter, right? I'm only in the opinion camp. None of you think I'm a journalist these days. You understand I'm an opinion writer. So that's the problem. And you have a lot of these, you know, incredibly woke, incredibly opinionated folks on the left.

and then you have these, you know, abhorrent trolls on the right, the Ben Shapiro's, etc. They both are smart individuals. This is not about intelligence. What it really is about is approach. And I think, as a society, we should let the young guns report for a decade. If they do really good reporting, like Alex does, let's say, then maybe we'll listen to your opinion. Casey Newton comes to mind. you know, the verge and Vox

are very much in the woke. You know, they're, their headlines are all outrageous. Like, they, they described the base camp issue as an implosion. Base camp implodes. And it was like, that's not exactly what happened.

I mean, they're kind of acting as if the company's going, when something implodes, that means it goes away, right? It's, it, an implosion is like an explosion, like the thing's destroyed. Basecamp, when any reasonable person looks at it, probably has 98 or 99% of the same revenue. The people who left, I can tell you, are easily replaceable. And that's not a dig to them.

But the founders are the most important people of the company. And the founders will find 10 people who are super qualified to replace every personal left. It will be, they will not skip a beat. I guarantee you of that. I have seen this movie before. And Coinbase, the same thing. Oh, Coinbase and bloated.

Oh, this hysterics. You know, that's what the Vox and the Verge and those kind of places do, Gawker previously, because they wanted the headlines. If you pick a side and you do a dramatic headline, you get clicks. But then what happens is you then garner the reputation amongst the serious people who are subjects who are like, oh, okay, I'm just not going to take a Verge or a Vox story. I'm not going to even engage with those riders. Like a lot of subjects will not engage with.

Mother Jones or Vox. They'll just assume it's going to be, or Vorge, it's going to be a biased story with a silly headline. So they're like, why would I put myself through that? Whereas, if you look at Kara Swisher, she can be super hypercritical of people and still get them on her show.

So you have to ask yourself, why is that still happening? It's because when she's reporting, she does a great job of reporting. And when she gives her opinion, it's very clear, this is her opinion, but she paid her dues with 30 years of reporting. And then 10 years or maybe it was 25 and 15.

I'm not sure exactly. And, you know, Coinbase did this crazy, you know, what most people consider a hit piece. It doesn't mean that the issues are not real, but the absolute sensationalism that I think the New York Times deploys that times, and certainly the Voxes, vices, buzz feeds, et cetera, link baiting, crazy headlines, that the authors of the stories are mortified by, you know, often.

I often will talk to a journalist when we're having a beer, and it'll be like, I didn't write the headline. I don't agree with the headline. And you heard me with Cade Mets talking about this with his Star Slate Codex story, the big controversial one. He's like the old school reporter. And I thought that, if you want to understand reporting, listen to that episode.

Because we really go deep. And he's, you know, defending his team. But he is also, we had a very productive discussion I felt on the exact issue I'm talking about here, which is the confusion of the audience between what's opinion and what's an actual reporting. I think the editorial page in the New York Times should be like ripped out. Same thing with other publications and be like in a separate publication in some way. We're really, really like this is the person's opinion. This is not reporting. this is reporting like really reset with the audience and then reset with the writers like

and if I if I was managing you know some of the effervescent um you know uh Twitter crowd I would tell them if you want to work at the New York Times you can't be causing chaos on Twitter because you're actually damaging the brand like it's pretty obvious that Taylor Lorenz is damaging the New York Times brand when she gets into these crazy silly fights or you know, says that Mark and Drayson call,

you know, use the R word when he didn't, which is a factual error, which I think she corrected, you know, after like being harangued, but also just

her general style of being hysterical. That doesn't help. And it's fine, you know, like one person's hysterical might be another person's passion. So I get it.

I probably seem hysterical when I talk about Facebook. But again, reporters or reporters, opinion writers for opinion writers, pundits or pundits, beat reporters, and that's at the core of the issue. And Cade Metz is episode 11 to 87, for those of you who want to listen to it. And there's a really interesting moment in the Cade Metz discussion. And I'm not saying this to call him out. I really do like him, and I think it was a great article. I think he actually, the article was great. The problem was the headline. The headline was Silicon Valley Safe Space, and I

that to him, I know like a total of three people who read that blog. And that headline implies that like, this is where we all hang out. I don't read it. No, I know three people who read it. And I think all three of them work for Peter Thiel. So you didn't write that headline, did you? You know, you notice how I framed questions, you know, a little framing. And, uh, your long pause. And he's like, well, we worked on it and he don't want to throw his guy under the bus. But just listen to it two or three times and you'll get the sense that like, He didn't love the headline. Let's put it that way.

At the least he didn't like the headline, I think if he was going to write the headline, it would have been totally different. Now, at the New York Times, the way he explained it was the writer and the editors collaborate on the headlines. At other publications, and you can look this up online,

they will even A, B, test, or multivariate test headlines. So they spend $100 on promoting the headline on a Facebook, social media, whatever, or they might write three headlines and their publishing software, their CMS, will show a thousand people, the first 3,000 people,

1,000 each in three cohorts, different headlines, and see how many of those tweeted? Whichever one gets tweeted the most, that becomes a permanent headline. See that? Did your brain just light up again? I bet it did.

Now you know what's going on. Now you know why people are asking this question. growth marketing and journalism and the reputation of journalists is incompatible. It's incompatible. And it's on all areas of the spectrum, from MSNBC and Mother Jones to Breitbart and, I don't know, Delhi. What's it called, Daily Caller? Yeah, Daily Caller, I think. And then the Daily Mall for gossip.

I don't know if they're left or right or just, you know, gossipy. All right, let's do another question. I love the journalism questions. Thanks for that one. I hope that was helpful. Alberto from our twist slack says, how do you validate the TAM calculation proposed by a startup? Tam is total addressable market.

Specifically when projects have a wide scope with several potential revenue streams, any advice for founders. Well, number one, we don't need your TAM as investors. I'm talking about professional investors. We have armies of researchers, associates, principles, managing, directors, and we, if we're serious about an investment, are going to do that work. If you do

share with us the Tam, that is interesting, maybe, because we get to see how you interpret it. But I would say lazy Tam is one of the problems here. And lazy Tam is, I just grabbed a Gartner number. Now, you grab the Gartner number for travel, and you're doing a travel startup. You say travels an $18 trillion industry, whatever it is. And you're doing eco-tourism. And, okay, travel includes buying the tickets on the planes, which you get no part of. It includes the hotels, but you're putting people in yurts. And it includes the money they spend on museum tours.

And it includes this, and includes that. So it's completely farcical that none of that is addressable, Tam, for you. That's one problem. The second problem, I think, is the great companies are companies that induce a market to exist. The total TAM for meditation apps, I like to tell people, was about a million dollars. It was certainly less than a million dollars. It was less than $250,000, I would say, when I invested in Com. Because there was Headspace and Com.

Nobody else was charging for meditation that I know of. And now I didn't go crazy looking for it because I was like, my opportunity is that this doesn't exist. And Airbnb didn't so much compete with hotels as it did got more people to travel. And Uber ultimately and Lyft were the true nature of Uber and Lyft was they were competing against public transportation, not going out, not going on the journey, not taking the trip, rather, and car ownership. So Tam is very different. And there's kind of a true Tam, and that's very hard to get to, I instruct my companies at the launch accelerator, which occurs seven, eight times a year, where we give you $100,000 for 6% of your company, and we work with you for 16 weeks,

and you get to really know me and my team, and then we invest in you again when you graduate, if you do a good job, and we keep investing, if you keep growing the company forever, apparently. It's kind of how it's been going, but for at least four or five rounds, I think. So, the interesting thing about True Tam is that it's based upon what you've already learned. I have 10 people who are taking Uber's in San Francisco in the beta. And this is true story. And those 10 people no longer use their other car service and they stop driving. And so this is what's happening. They are now using it four times a week. They're using it seven times a week. They're spending this amount per year. If we had, we believe there's a thing.

thousand more people like that in San Francisco. So if we had those thousand, it would be this, and we believe there's a thousand more cities like San Francisco, so we would have a million of these people. Now you're starting to make a calculation. Some people might call it back of the envelope. I coined the term, bottom up tam, because I wanted people to start with reality and build up. And it's building up an argument. What if people started dropping their kids off in school or, you know, kids would go on a play date and they would send their kids in an Uber. Okay, I didn't think about that. Yeah, and some number of parents, you know, are late to pick up their kids from soccer, or what if I got rid of my car, right?

You start building up those kind of things. So Elad Gill, I think, who was on the episode, I forgot which episode he was on, but Elad Gill, who was on the pod, he self-reclamed himself as a market pull investor, and he values Tam over everything. So there are people who really care about this, and so I don't actually think about it all that much. I like the bottom up. I'm an early stage investor. And Elad Gill was on the Angel podcast Season 5, Episode 3.

If you look at Uber's revenue at $11 billion and growing 20% a year, none of us would have expected that. So I think people make Tam into too big of a thing. In your presentation, it would be much more effective for you to talk about your top five customers than to talk about Tam. I'm guaranteeing you, every investor would rather hear about you say, here are five most engaged customers. This one pays the most, this one uses it the most, this one gets the most value from it, and this one sends us the most suggestions. Wow, that's actually a really good framework. Hey, somebody on my team clipped that and send it to all our companies for their decks.

And even when you look at those top four or five customers, I just off the top of my head defined them as most engaged, got the most value, spent the most money, spent the most time, and gave the most suggestions. Let's just pick five vectors. It could be different, you know, for if you're a food service, it would be how often they ordered, maybe the size of their order. Let's put that aside for a second. That actually lets you define personas.

So one persona might be somebody who doesn't spend a lot of money, but extracts a lot of value. In other words, the person who, you know, buys three seats to the software and tells the sales team to use one login, the other, they buy one copy of Photoshop and they install it on four computers and unplugged four of them from the internet, you know, that kind of guy. So you might have people who just extract the ton of value pay a little bit. find out people who are whales who are like, oh, I love superhuman so much. Everybody in the company gets superhuman. And then you find out, you know, out of your 20 people, there are four who are

conscientious objectors and don't like the font in superhuman and don't use it. So, you know, that, those personas would then let you say, well, how many cheapskates are there and abusers of our system, a la people who share Amazon Prime accounts, people who share Netflix accounts and Spotify accounts. Okay, how many of them are there? Can we move them into a family plan right? Like I moved into the Spotify family plan and the ICloud family plan because I was like, well, now I got three daughters. It's time for me to figure out this stuff and give everybody their own Spotify account and their own Netflix login so that they can have their own top shows in their own algorithm. Maybe that's a bad parenting decision. I'm not sure. I got to think about that one.

But anyway, you could then build a Tam by persona. And so what's really interesting about this conversation is there's lazy tam and, you know, then there's thoughtful tam. So my hope for you is that you build a thoughtful total addressable market. There are this many people who are CFOs of companies with between 100 and 1,000 employees. That's our sweet spot. That's our ideal customer profile. So we want to get those thousand people and they spend 10,000 a year. There's a 10 million dollar tam in the United States for that group. Who knows what it is around the world. We'll figure that out later. But we know we can get half that 10 million or at least a third of it. So that's enough for us to get going. And that's what you're looking for. That's what you're looking for because,

you know, look at Uber right now. I don't think the board, maybe I shouldn't say certain things, but I think it's enough time that's gone by. The board wanted to stop Uber Eats. The board wanted to not have Uber Eats. There was a big board conflict about this. And if they didn't have it, it's now bigger than the rides business. And not only is it bigger than the rides business, it looks a lot like Amazon's business.

And it's kind of better than Amazon's business in a lot of cases like getting booze. Like, if you want vodka and you want pizza and a cassidia, and you need a razor blade because you're staying at a hotel in New York and you've got to be at a meeting and you forgot yours, Uber Eats, which is basically Uber Sundries now, and Uber booze, is pretty freaking great.

So this made Uber anti-fragile. Nassim Taleb has not been on the program yet. I have read each of his books and listened to them two or three times. Each time I understand seven percent more. He probably shouldn't be on this podcast because frankly, I'm such an idiot that I don't think I could make a great podcast out of it. He probably should be on Tim Ferriss's or Sam Harris's, people smarter than me.

But we probably have more laughs. on mine, I'll be totally honest. It might be better for all of us to have him on here because we can kind of together try to understand his brilliance. Also, as an aside, Nassim Tileb gets asked so many times. He's like, I don't do podcasts. Read my books. But I think that might be one we're offering them 10 grand to do it. Like I said, donation to charity. I've never paid anybody to be on the podcast, but I was just thinking, if you guys really want him to be on, I would make a 10k donation to his favorite charity. And if his favorite charity was Vuv Kliqo, I would send him a bunch of Vuv. I got a bunch of boxes laying around here.

Sure, we'll send him 10,000 above. Somebody clip this and send it to Nassim. Anyway, anti-fragile, pretty great to be during a pandemic, huh? Rides go to zero or, you know, whatever, 20%. Uber Eats go supernova. Pretty great. Great job, D.K. I give Dara a lot of credit.

You know, he sees the opportunity. He cut that burn. And he's looking at Tam saying, huh, ride Tim. Great. We already own that. Hmm. Delivery tam. We already own 30% of that,

whatever it is, 23% of that, depending on the market. Okay, pretty good. Oh, booze. Razor blades, newspapers, bagels. I don't think we own any of that.

Huh. You see where I'm going with this? There's plenty of time to expand your Tam later. Pick an early beachhead market. Understand your customers. Have ideal customer profiles. Order your ideal customer profiles.

And like a military operation, you go right down the line, you pick your ideal customer profile, you own it, and you delight them. You can't win a war on all fronts. You're not Thanos or the Avengers. You're neither. You can't just snap your fingers and win. You don't have Iron Man and Thor. You don't have a Hulk. You got limited resources.

You're like Ant Man. Stay in your lane. You can get only so much accomplished if you're Ant Man. It's not a lot of great superpowers. I mean, I don't know who's even weaker in the Avengers. I mean, you're Black Widow. Like, she's a human being who knows karate. Or Tony Stark without the armor.

Like, Batman, you know. Like, some of these superheroes are mortals. Like, that's us when we're running companies. So understand that you can win only so many battles. VCs understand that. Pump the brakes on the bullshit tam. Bottom up, thoughtful, strategic, consider Tam. And when you go into that meeting, say it just like I'm saying it. You have my

permission to go into that meeting. And when they say, talk to me about the Tam. And you say, we're not focused on a giant big number that Gartner put out. We're focused on customers. And we are delighting those customers. And you're going to win.