This Week in Startups - Ghost Engineers, Measuring Productivity, & Memecoin Scams | E2056

Episode Date: December 7, 2024

Todays show: In this episode, we discuss Hailey Welch and the viral Hawk coin, then discuss David Sachs' new White House role and recent job data's economic impact. We address the United Healthcare CEO's murder, debate cancel culture, and a viral tweet on software engineers' habits. Deedy Das offers insights on tech inefficiencies and the shift to in-person work. Coffeezilla joins to explore crypto scams, influencer marketing ethics, and regulation. We wrap up with David Sachs' Czar role in AI and crypto for the US government, market dynamics, and a new addition to the Twist 500. * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show (1:53) Economic outlook and recent job data (5:12) Reaction to United Healthcare CEO murder (9:19) LinkedIn Ads - Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (10:48) Cancel culture debate and public statements (16:00) Viral tweet about software engineers' work habits (19:02) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist (20:08) DeeDee Doss interview on software engineer productivity (23:17) Management incentives and tech company inefficiencies (25:16) Shift to in-person work in tech startups (29:37) Ramp - Get $250 when you join Ramp today at https://www.ramp.com/twist (31:20) Remote work psychology and potential abuse (37:35) Strategies to prevent remote work abuse (39:24) Hayley Welch interview on viral meme coin (41:00) Coffeezilla's investigations into scams and frauds (47:42) Cryptocurrency red flags and influencer consequences (52:50) Crypto regulation and influencer marketing ethics (59:03) Influencer credibility and responsibility (1:03:21) Coffeezilla's assignment and Rabbit AI device insights (1:04:01) David Sachs announcement and AI/crypto in government (1:07:25) Regulatory capture and Silicon Valley dynamics (1:09:15) Market perspectives and government influence * Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Apply for the Launch CloudKitchens Incubator here: https://ck.launch.co Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Mentioned on the show: Check on Menlo Ventures: https://menlovc.com/ Check out Coffeezilla: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFQMnBA3CS502aghlcr0_aw * Follow Coffeezilla: X: https://x.com/coffeebreak_YT * Follow Deedy: X: https://x.com/deedydas LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/debarghyadas/ * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (9:19) LinkedIn Ads - Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (19:02) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist (29:37) Ramp - Get $250 when you join Ramp today at https://www.ramp.com/twist * Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

I get to say the following words on twist. Haley Welch, the woman who went viral for the Hock Tour phenomena, launched a meme coin. And guess what, Jason? It has not turned out to be a blue chip investment. What? If what Haley's entertainment lawyer said is true and she's locked up for a year, while all the pre-sell guys already have sold,

yes, they've cleared it. It's kind of, you know, that's kind of a bad news for her. She's a mark for them, theoretically here. I don't know the details, but I think she's the mark. This Weekend Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. To redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com slash this weekend startups. Vanta.

Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a sock to report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. and Ramp, the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and money. Get $250 when you join Ramp today at ramp.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. I'm your host, Jason Kalakanis, here with my co-host, Alex Wilhelm. We have a full news docket.

It is Friday, December 6th, 2024. It's still 2024, and there's a lot going on. Obviously, everybody wants to know my comments on David Sacks and him being, named as a White House advisor around AI and cryptocurrency. I will give my thoughts on that towards the second half of the show, but I know you love the numbers, Alex, and we've got two great guests today. We'll have coffeezilla on to talk about the Hocua coin. Yes. And we're going to have another guest talk about his incredible insights into developers, but there's a bunch of other stuff going on that we should talk about. Yeah. So first up, just for everyone out there,

who cares about the economic side of things, today was jobs. day. If you track economic data, this is always the best day of the month. So, according to BLS, government data, Jason, total non-farm payroll employment rose by $227,000 in November. That was better than an expected $214,000 number. Okay. But the good news is that people are still pricing in an 85% chance of a rate cut in December. Okay. This month. So it's not going to slow down the rate cut reductions that everyone's so excited about. You know, I'm a little concerned that, that the inflation might come back. Maybe I'm a little bit gun-shy, perhaps. But this is such a malchrom. You know, sometimes there's a storm. And you know when the storm ends, you get like

pockets of chaos, you know, as the skies are clearing. So you're kind of coming out of the storm. As we come out of this inflation storm, it's going to be a lot of conflicting data. We obviously have had a stock market that's ripped in the final year or two of Biden's administration. And now, with the Trump bump. You and this data about jobs is very perplexing to me because we're seeing in our industry no additional jobs and people are not adding a bunch of employees. But I know I'm adding employees and things are going really good at our firm. So I keep adding people, but I'm seeing other people with the same number of employees and then everything in between. So you can't paint with one brush, but obviously the stock market is way ahead of its skis.

Oh, God, yes. Yeah. So I feel like there's a little bit of like bubbleishness, happening. Maybe people are getting too optimistic. The jobs numbers are realistic. The inflation is realistic. But if that three handle comes back, we go from 2.x, I don't know what it was last time, 2.4, 2.4, 2.5. I think it was 2.4. You know, we start to see 2.9, and God forbid, we see a 3.1 or a 3.2. And these numbers are not perfect. I know people get all kinds of crazy. So it's going to be choppy coming out of the storm, is my message to everybody. But there is never a bad time to start a company. Michael Dell did a great tweet today. He said he did $1.7 trillion in revenue from Dell from starting in his U.T dorm room. If you're thinking about starting a startup, forget all of this

macro information. Forget about competitors. Just start a company. If you can't start a company, you don't have a great idea. Join a company. If you can't find a company to join and you got a bunch of money sitting around and you're in the last third of your career, invest in a startup. If you don't have money to invest in a startup and you can't join one, just try a startup's product. That's my message today. Just support startups, start startups, invest in startups, and the world will get better, and you'll have a lot more fun in your life. One more note on the inflation point. You talking about how it's sticky and a little bit of hard. There was a great quote from Waller over on the Fed. He said this week, overall, I feel like an MMA fighter who keeps getting inflation in a chokehold,

waiting for it to tap out, get it keeps slipping out of my grasp at the last minute. But let me assure you that submission is inevitable. Inflation isn't getting out of the octagon. Never thought that my knowledge of combat sports was going to help my inflation washing Jason, but that is the latest from the Fed. So more to come on that front. And really briefly, everybody, we touched on the murder in New York City on Wednesday when it was very, very fresh. Since then, there's been quite a lot of conversation about it, just to put a little color on things. 404 media reported that major health insurance companies are taking down their leadership pages quite seriously. I wonder, Jason, if having a LinkedIn page, for example, is going to become something you don't do

past a certain level of seniority. But you had an interesting tweet. You said that, My Lord, there's a lot of pent of anger towards these healthcare companies, and it's not just from one person. It's all over TikTok today. What did you see out there? I mean, I tweeted some of the videos. Taylor Lorenz, who's obviously very outspoken, friend of this pod. She's been on many times. We're not like personal friends or anything, but she's a friend of the pod. And she does great moments of journalism where she covers social media. She's had some pretty spicy tweets. of like wondering and you're wondering why, I think it was the quote, you're wondering why we want these CEOs dead. It was a very inappropriate quote. We all know that. She should not have said it

way out of bounds. She then doubled down on it in a blog post promoting her new substack or her newsletter, just really bad. You know, if I was talking to her privately and I told her publicly, just you don't gloat over people's death. No matter how you feel about the oppression and the oppressed of what's fair, what's evil. And, you know, you can make a really good argument. that it is evil to deny people health care and that people die because they've been denied health care. I don't think anybody would say that is not something that occurs. Now, I don't know how often it occurs.

I think this is going to create a lot of reckoning, but nobody should be murdered and called blood for the love of God. And we should not be wishing more death. And the stuff on TikTok specifically, which is really kind of like surfaces this stuff. And I wonder if the Chinese, and there's some news about today, I wonder if the Chinese are doing this to incite more violence in our country and incite more division.

It reminds me of what the Russians did, you know, where they were putting both sides of protests, especially race-based ones. And this is another wedge issue, which is health care. If you think about things in America that we don't agree on and that we're very, very have non-consensus and that make people get really angry. Healthcare and universal health care is one. And obviously, race is another. These are really open wounds here in America. and the Russians knew to exploit those during election cycles. And obviously the Chinese who are, you know, have an interest in creating strife here and distracting us.

My Lord, the stuff people were saying was so terrible. I don't even want to repeat it here, but they were printing pictures of the other CEOs of the health companies, how much they made. And the ratio of the young, the lowest employee to the highest employee, you know, this is 300 times. You know, they make 10 million a year. The lowest employee makes 100. It's 100x. Whatever is. This kind of violent rhetoric, there is no.

no place in the world for it. This is not something to glowed on. It is really, really disturbing to me. Not just because I back CEOs and I'm a capitalist. It's just disturbing because the person's a father. Yeah. But what struck me is when this happened, and my first thought was, I wonder if this was a targeted killing. It ended up being one. And then as we learned from certain inscriptions on shell casings, that is probably one that had a motivation behind it. It wasn't just, a robbery or something like that. I thought to myself, someone's going to get fired on Twitter today.

And unsurprisingly, people have been popping off. But the reason why I wanted to ask you by your tweet and what you saw on TikTok is I was shocked at how much this story resonated on Reddit across forums. There was a great story from the Daily Beast. Moderators delete Reddit thread as Doctors Torch, dead United Healthcare CEO. The nursing subreddit was popping off.

Lost your generation, economic collapse, a lot of some weird subverts that I tracked. This was all over. And so what struck me was, well, one, I agree with you.

I'll say it again. Don't shoot people. Do not murder people. But the sheer amount of anger here that I knew people didn't like insurance, health insurance. I knew it's expensive. I knew the claims to get tonight.

But the willingness of people to be like, you know what, F that guy. That did take me by surprise. So I think maybe we should probably work on making health insurance better. Have you built something awesome? Are you ready to bring it to market?

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It's one of these things where, gosh, you know, there's multiple things can be true concurrently. And because of anonymity and the web and people's ability to publish and people's ability to be amplified, you know, somebody might say something like Taylor Loren said at a dinner party. Somebody at the dinner party might give her a little bit of grace and a little bit of space for what you said and said, you know, I disagree respectfully. But when you say something like that online and you got a lot of followers, as I well know, because I say some spicy things online, you know, you have to think about your platform and you got to think about, well, what if you were to say something and then another crazy person goes and kills another person? Yeah. And I think about that all the time,

you know, and I didn't used to think about that 20 years ago, but as the amount of people who follow me on social media or listen to my podcast, I actually do think about those things. Yeah. And I try to be very thoughtful when I say things. And you'll hear me often say now, where I maybe wouldn't say it, I would respond to a news story and just say, well, that person's dumb or, you know, that's a stupid decision. I might say now, if that reporting is true. Yeah. And I might just give a little caveat there. And I'll tell people, hey, let's reserve some judgment here. Let's wait for the facts to come out. But if we are going to speculate, here are some things that I think are important to keep in mind. Or this person, if they did in fact do this,

this would be a stupid decision. You know, I just try to be thoughtful about it. And I don't go anywhere near violence. Yeah. Because you know that the number of people suffering for mental illness is very high in the United States right now. Post-COVID, there's a lot of different reasons. And then you add to this healthcare, and it could in fact be the same group of people we're talking about, people who don't have health care who are suffering from mental illness. It could be like an overlap here, which could make this even, you know, more violent and there could be more violence. It just, I feel so bad for this person's kids. I just keep going back.

When you're a dad and you just start thinking about, gosh, there are two kids there who are not going to get to know their dad. And they're going to have to have their entire lives defined by this terrible moment. Yeah. If the guy had a pie thrown in his face, like that absurdist used to do hit Bill Gates with a pie, I don't like that either. But if there was a protest and people sat in the office or, you know, Greenpeace, you know, and they did something that was, you know, on the edge of protesting, I, I, there's a spectrum here of like what's allowed, even January 6th. falls on that spectrum, right? Some people were protesting. Some people were breaking stuff. Some people got out of control. We got to get this spectrum towards peaceful protests when people have grievance in competition and make better products and services. But, oh my God, this is really like,

I'm, I don't know about you, but as a dad, it's just this, I'm ruminating. And I'm doing it right now on the pot. So I apologize for ruminating, but I'm ruminating about this guy's kids. It makes me really sad. It makes me very, very sad, too. I have other thoughts about people talking about this and cancel culture and so forth. By the way, I'm bringing up Taylor because, you You know, she's got a big platform. I don't think Taylor should be canceled for this. I think she should speak her mind. Yes.

And I'm not going to not say her name because she's saying spicy stuff. We've got to dress that head on. And she's welcome to go on the program and talk about it. But I do think she should go through the same journey I went through, which is as you get more popular, just think through what you're saying and think about how a mentally ill person might interpret what you're saying. So that's the nuanced take that I kind of expected from you. I follow Mike Solana on Twitter, the Pirate Wires guy.

he was tweeting about how like, oh, I think the information once hired Taylor to write something. And he's like, oh, Jessica, how do you feel about that? And I quote tweeted him with the thing for the Elon Musk quote, essentially that he said recently, which is canceled culture is canceled. I thought cancel culture was canceled. And then he hits me with,

do you support and agree with what she said? And I said, no. And that was the end of it. But I was like, wait a minute. I thought, you're this. is an important part of the of the story as well. Are people allowed to say things that are uncouth? Are people allowed to say things that could potentially cause real world harm if it's their opinion? And you know what? You have to make, there's a moment of personal responsibility here.

Yes. What I'll encourage people as an elder statesman, and I'm older than Taylor, and I'm older than Mike. And I respect both of their performance as a journalist. I think they both do a great job of what they do, by the way. I think pirate wise has a great job. They do some incredible investigative work. You don't have to agree with him politically on everything. I think he does a tremendous job. I think Taylor does a tremendous job. But think about your platform and if there can be real world harm. And then also, hey, there could be some hypocrisy here. Like, you're ratting out Taylor Lorenz to Jessica to try to get her fired. That's a valid point you're making. Like, you're literally trying to get her canceled. On the other side, it is your right to say,

I unsubscribe from the information today because they employ Taylor Lorenz and I disagree with her point. That would be a better statement, right? My point about cancel culture that I've had for a long time is cancel culture was mostly just market-based response to very, very unpopular speech. And if you have a free market economy, there's going to be responses to things. And here we have Mr. Salon doing just that. And I just found it ironic. Anyways, let's let's keep on. We got a lot on the docket. Tell Lorenge, you're welcome to come on. We should have Mike on at some point. He would be a great guest as well. That would be fun. Mike, if you're watching this, come on the show. We'd love to talk to you. Okay, so a tweet was going around that I thought was indicative of where software is as a industry in Silicon Valley.

Here's this tweet from a man named D.D. He says for people who are on the audio, everyone thinks this is an exaggeration, but there are so many software engineers, not just at Fang, who I know personally, who literally make two code changes a month, send a few emails, a few meetings, remote work, less than five hours a week for 200,000 to 300,000. dollars per year. And Jason, when I saw this, I thought to myself, he's coming on the show. This blew up. Feels like a main character of the week to me. Yes. And it did blow up. And I became aware of it when you shared it with me. And then I saw Aaron Levy looking at it. And then I saw Mark Andreessen talking on Joe Rogan. There was a very

interesting clip of him talking about a high profile CEO who found out a lot of people in the organization were using mouse jigglers. And they bought the top mouse jigglers, according to Mark Andreessen, figured out the patterns, looked for that pattern in the employee monitoring and the computer monitoring software. So people who are on remote, I've told them this before. I don't use it at our companies. I did look into it. I didn't think it was necessary. We're a 21-person company. I should know how hard people are working generally. But if I did have 200, I would definitely employ the software. There's software that monitors your desktop. Make sure your computer is being used for work. And if you're an employee, you're having your screen shot every 30.

seconds, your desktop is being screenshoted, put into a database, and being held for all time, your keystrokes are being monitored, and your mouse movements are being monitored. Most people are smart enough to know this software exists. And they said, this person then just looked, figured out who was using a mouse jiggler, and fired them all, just like people have been doing with coffee badging. So if you were doing something like buying a mouse jiggler, that should be an alert to you that you're committing a crime. You are committing fraud against your employer. You're stealing from an employer. No different than taking coffee beans from the commissary or stealing pens, but this would be even worse because

they're trusting you. They're trusting you. Now, I'm not saying I never took a legal pad or a pen home from work when I was a kid. I did. I had a pen. I had a pad. I thought it was cool. I didn't take 50 pens of 50 pads, but I might have had two or three pens in my bag.

And even then, I obsessed over it, Alex. That's the morals that my mom put in me. Yes. That stealing was the worst thing you could ever do. and I would bring pens back to work and put them in the desk if I found them at home. I'm a little nuts, but who in their mind does this? Put a jiggler on their mouse. As a fellow Boy Scout, I totally agree with you.

But I want to get DD on. Let's get D-D on the show. D-D. Doss, if you don't know, he's an investor over at Minlo. And he previously was a software engineer at Google. It was an engineering fellow at KP and also head of product at Glean. There he is. Ladies and gentlemen. Founders.

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It can take months without Vanta, and they automate compliance for GDPR, HIPAA, and more. So you can sell to bigger customers in whatever markup your startup is going after. Vanta is going to save you hundreds of hours of work and up to 85% on compliance costs. Stop slowing your sales, team down, and use Vantta. Get $1,000 off at Vanta.com slash twist. That's Vanta.com slash twist for $1,000 off your sock, too. So, Deity, the reason why I think this thread took off is not because you said something that was de novo. People have been talking about slacker engineers for a while.

But then you said, here are some of those companies. Oracle, Salesforce, Cisco, Workday, SAP, IBM, VMware, Intuit, Autodesk, Viva, Box, Citrix, Adobe. One, do you have that many friends who are working at all those different companies? And two, how mad are they at you for narking on them on the internet and going viral and ruining their free ride? They're pretty mad. I mean, I'll tell you a quick anecdote. I was at a wedding back in India a couple weeks ago, and I was introduced to this person. I never met him before.

And he says, hi, nice to meet you. I said, I'm Didi. He's like, my wife hates you. And I'm like, I don't, I've just met you. And he says, well, she works at Box. And yeah, so people are pretty, pretty much. mad. I ended up speaking to the wife and she was like, it's all true. Okay, how did you get this information? Can you explain how you figured everything out and? It's not that complicated.

Like, I was a software engineer, most of Gleen, all of Google. And between Google and Glean, I saw that work culture shift between people who work basically 20 hours or less versus 80 hours a week. And all my friends would talk about it. All my friends are software engineers, you know? So, whenever we talk, it's like, it's incredible how much they can get away with. I can tell you one person who literally told me, you know, I've been saying I'm worried about the pandemic and COVID and all of this stuff. I've been in Mexico for three years. My boss doesn't know. There's some incredible stuff that's going on. And I just think, I'm not trying to rat them out. I just think it's unfair to so many people who actually do have to work really hard for no real

reward and meanwhile you have people making a 300k in Mexico doing nothing. Can we step backwards for a second, Alex? How did D.D. find out that people were working more or less? I thought he was just talking to people, but there was also a study from Stanford that found, according to it, that 9.5% of software engineers are, what was the phrase, did he ghosts, essentially? Yeah. This was predicated, though, Jason, on Git commits.

So essentially, like, how much code did you ship in that format? Got it. There was some, I think, reasonable nuance in the conversation about if Git commits are actually the best way to vet developer productivity. But I think the response to that study was people going, yeah, I've seen that. So similar to what D.D. said. So a mix of anecdotes and what I might call very strong anecdot. You had a bunch of conversations. That's where you got most of your information from.

I've also been a manager in the past. I've seen people who've done it, not done it. And I do agree, like, there's a more complicated conversation to be had here because software engineering productivity is not easy to measure. It's not done with Git commits. It's not done with lines of code. It's really hard to get an accurate view of whether an engineer is good or not. And that's exactly what's abused.

And then there's this other whole side of the story of, you know, what are the incentives at play here? And if you look at these, especially at the company gets bigger, I had a follow up read about this as well. it's just like, managers have no incentive to fire any of the reports. If you're a middle manager at Google, all you care about saying is you tell your boss, look, my guys are working all the time. I need more head to count.

That's what gets you promoted. You don't get promoted for saying, some of my guys are slacking off. It doesn't give you anything. And I think this incentive structure is what leads to the situation. Right. And that's why to me, this was not exactly a remote only story because I've worked in offices. and if you're an employee at an office, you can tell within three days, who is the person who circulates the office doing conversations and who actually does the work?

But here's my question, DD, about larger companies. And I'm glad you worked at Google because you have experience. Is it possible to build a company that scales past, I don't know, 1,000 or 10,000 people that has a strong software engineering component to it that doesn't fall prey to too many layers of management, internal empire building, like ghost workers? It seems that every single major successful, wealthy technology company has internal rot to its structure that it can't break away from.

And I just wonder, is anyone doing this well or is this just the way it goes at large technology companies? Well, I think we all know the answer to that. You've got to look at Mr. Musk and look at his companies. I think that's the only example that I can think of where this is done somewhat well. And there's obviously a lot of criticism there as well. At scale, it's really hard to run a big organization with the right incentive structures. I haven't seen too many.

I've had friends who work at X, who work at Tesla, who do say that they have a version of that that does kind of work, even though it's not without flaws, but it is quite difficult to do. Okay. And then a question about the Menlo portfolio, because we have you here, have you guys seen a shift away from remote and kind of the hybrid remote setup that a lot of startups had, and has that increased in tempo in the last six to nine months? Because it does feel the tech conversation around that has become more. So I'm just curious how that shows up in your port to us.

Both in the portfolio and outside of it, there has been more CEOs want to have in-person artwork. I think most CEOs prefer that. But I do want to say that this is not, it's not the only way it works. I mean, I think not in our portfolio, but there's a great company called GitLab works really well remote. I met another company, a small startup in New York, fantastic company. They build these open source Python tools, Astral.

fully remote. And they're fantastic at it. So, you know, there's no one way to do it, but it is true, I think, that remote is harder to get right than in-person work. Here's the data I just pulled up from this Yigur.

I'm at Stanford and I researched software engineering productivity. We have data on the performance of greater than 50,000 engineers from hundreds of companies inspired by D-D-D-D-D-D-D-S. That is your handle on X, D-E-E-D-A-S. Our research shows 9.5% of software engineers do virtually nothing, ghost engineers, which is crazy. And he explains here,

how do we know that 9.5% of software engineers are ghosts? Our model quantifies productivity by analyzing source code from private Git repo, simulating a panel of 10 experts, evaluating each commit across multiple dimensions. We publish a paper, and we have more on this coming. So it's pretty clear that this exists. And so I guess what we're going to see over time is employers are getting upset. they feel that this is stealing. It is stealing, whether you're a salesperson who doesn't show up for work or you're a writer who phones it in, whatever it is, you're stealing. And the problem is you're breaking trust. And once you break the trust, there's going to be an overreaction for management and then it becomes super adversarial. So are these employees, and hey, oh, and by the way,

I was at X on Twitter when Elon took it over and we were looking at this. There were many people who hadn't badged in in years and who hadn't done a commit in years. So you put those two things together. never been to the office, they've never committed code or they haven't committed a car a long time. Like, why are they here? Right? Like, if you're a developer, you've done no commits, like you can just start with that group of people. So the waste and the abuse, and let's just call what it is, stealing is pervasive. And when I say pervasive, like, it's not just like a one-off. There's, I think a lot, there's a culture somewhere in this of adversarialness between the employer and the employee, D.D. Do you agree? And what,

take us into the psychology of a person who believes that they should take a salary from one company, maybe two, and do no work, or fake the work, or put a jiggler on their mouths. Take us into that psychology. But when you talk to those people or you've met them, like, what do they think about stealing? I think it separates into two buckets, right? I think one bucket is just, I think this work is boring. and no one's forcing me to do it. So why am I wrong here?

I'm not misleading somebody. I'm not lying and saying I'm doing something. I'm not. I am doing exactly what they're telling me to do, and it's just not that much. So that's one school of thought. So it's management's fault that they're not managing me proper. It's not my responsibility to say,

the job you gave me, I'm getting done in five hours a week. I have 35 more hours. Give me more work. I feel bad about it. Yeah, no one's going to say that. They're dumb. They don't know.

Therefore, what I'm doing is not criminal. It's their incompetence. You're blaming the other person for stealing. Yeah. If my manager gives me five hours a week of work, I'm not going to go and say, give me 40 hours a week. That's not my job.

My job is to do the work I'm given. That's a real problem in my mind. It is. But then I'll quickly talk about the second school, which is there is like going back to the incentive problem. If you're a software engineer, at some level, you're like, say you're like an L5,

six engineer, senior to staff engineer, you're thinking, what do I get out of this? Right? Like, I can overperform. I get no reward. I get no recognition. I don't really get up the ladder. I get paid one way or the other. Why am I going to go out of my way to try to bust my ass for this job where no one's

giving me any, any prizes in return? So there's those two larger groups that I would point at. Hey, everybody. I want to tell you about an awesome corporate card. and spend management software that's designed to help you save money. Basically, it puts money back in your pocket. It's called Ramp. And we use it here at launch.

MyCO. Heidi, our chief operating officer, loves it because Ramp gives you visibility into your company's software usage. And this is going to help you trim your subscription costs. And it allows you to issue cards to every employee and then give them limits and restrictions. So we do this. Sometimes we'll have the whole team go to an offsite.

We send everybody a Ramp card. everybody has a certain amount of money they can spend, and they don't have to worry about using their personal cards or submitting an expense report or any of that drama. No. And RAMP customers save about 5% on their expenses every year because you can do things like dial up and dial down how much money can be charged to a card. Ramp software is so smart, you no longer have to do manual expense reports either. And they'll even play backhop for your company chasing down missing documentation and requesting repayment. Ramp's so easy. easy to use and you can start making payments in less than 15 minutes. So join Ramp right now and

they'll give you $250 right into your account.Ramp.com slash twist. R-A-M-P-com slash twist. It is the best way to manage expenses for your team. It's elegant. It's dead simple and it's going to save you money. Disclamor, cards issued by Sutton Bank, members FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. So the idea is if you have a job, Alex, you need to get some candy. some participation trophy, some pat on the head for doing extra work, as opposed to getting paid for hours of work. And I think there's like a very easy, simple solution here is just put people on hourly. Like, you could just move these employees to an hourly consulting job. And like, what are you going to have to do, like monitor their screen to make sure they're writing code

every hour? Like, do people, D.D, know that are in some of these companies, their screen's not being recorded. They don't have monitoring software and the developers? They do. Some of them do. I don't think most people look at monitoring. I think, look, it's too simplistic to suggest that, frankly, in my opinion, because engineering is a hard job, right? It's easy to say no commits in two years. You're probably not doing your job. Agreed. But the middle ground is really hard to iron out. The nuance is really key. I'll give you a quick example. At Google, you have front-end engineers who are working on UI on search. I was on search, and then you have search ranking engineers.

Search ranking engineers, you know, for whatever you think of Google search right now, they have a really tough job where maybe in three months you commit two commits that really change the game for how search works. Whereas if you're a front-end engineer, you can get 10 commits a week and do really meaningfully nothing for the product. So there is a bit of nuance in like how do you actually assess what is hours of work here? Because a lot of the work is thinking. Because the way I thought about this is you got hired to do 40 hours of work a week.

It's in the contract. And like to do five or 10 and not do the other 30 would, to me, feel wrong. Yeah, I know. Or am I just like an old school cranky old man now? No, I think you're a cranky old venture capitalist and employer, which I think is a very perfect, sorry, specific type of old man. And here's the thing. Companies will often ask you to work more than they pay you for. And you eat that overtime as paying your dues, doing your bit, helping your team.

And the company will give you zero compensation for overtime if you're a salaried employee. Right. We all know this. Blah, blah, blah. Dedey mentioned 80 hours a week. Okay. Doing that's rational economic activity for a lot of people. But a lot of people also have jobs, apparently, where they can work less and get paid the

same. It's rational, I think, as an economic actor to do that. We also give companies a lot of grace. There is a lot of wage theft in this country. We don't complain about that's theft. So to me, I think it's a little simplistic you could say these people are stealing. Would I do it? No.

Also, I don't know where these jobs are where you don't have to work. I've never had one. I've always ended up with more work than I can do. But you also have pride. I watch. I work with you now. Like, I watch you work, Alex. Like, if you didn't have enough work, you'd say to me, I think, like, hey, am I doing a good job, boss?

Is there anything I can do more to help out on the margins? I watch you take on work that I didn't ask you to do. Yeah. And I would think everybody would have that normal and compass. People, people are lazy. I mean, right? Like, I guess that's what it comes down to, Dedi. Okay, a message to everybody who's abusing the system, you're going to fuck it up for everybody.

Yeah, I'm remote. Stop making remote work look bad. Like, dude, God. I mean, this is literally what's going to happen. And it's, you know, I'm lucky because the people who work for me, do meetings and I just know how many meetings they do a day or a week because we have calendars and it's like I mean you can't fake it if your job is to meet with startups three four five times a day the most you could do is screw around in between the meetings I guess

but at least I'm getting those three meetings or four meetings with founders a day out of you I mean this is like super disturbed where does this all end up dd you're mind yeah wait jason I want to i want to clarify that question so we only have them for one more deedee if google fired 80% of its engineers tomorrow on the search team, on the search ads team, across the company, did what you said, kind of the mux,

sorry, the Musk X strategy. What would happen? I think 80% is tough for Google specifically because they're split into so many products that don't make revenue, but I would say you could probably get away with 50% and it would be fine.

I'll tell you a quick story. When I left Google, I was talking to a Google veteran who'd been there for like 20 plus years, and I said, you were having like banter and I was like, you know, at Google, you know, who hadn't done anything for the last year and a half. Isn't that crazy? And he looks at me and goes like, I've known people who haven't done anything for 10 years.

Well, here's the thing about Google specifically. When Google came in, I remember talking to like Larry and Sergei in the early days and Marissa and, you know, the whole crew over there. And their philosophy was if you're smart and you're in Silicon Valley, you want to be in tech, we're hiring you. We'll figure out later what you're going to do here because we have a money-printing machine and we can afford to do so. And for every smart person we hire, that reduces the chances of a competitor. And they literally were hiring talented people in Silicon Valley at 2x the rate and giving them 10 times the perks, which everybody else followed, in order to pursue this strategy of removing talent from the playing field and then having the optionality of just having great players

in case somebody gets injured or to do a skunk works project. And they literally had a 20%. They had so much talent there. They said, take 20% time. Every Friday, work on whatever project you want, let us know. And so they created this culture. And then I think the culture now, because of the lack of loyalty from employers to employees, employees feel very valid. I can understand it. I don't feel that way myself. But I could understand somebody who's watched them, their friends get laid off of them getting to say, F, this company, I'm going to get mine. Here's what companies need to do and employees need to do in order to end the standoff. And keep remote work alive if you care to do that.

If you set put monitoring software in everybody's goddamn computer and do not shop on your work computer, do not work on your side hustle on your work computer. And they're just going to have to spot check employees. That's what's going to happen. And that's what's going to happen. And that's what needs to happen in our government, too. If you work for our government and Doge, if you're not on your computer for eight hours a day, 40 hours a week, if you're not in the office for eight hours a day, yeah, no job for you. Sorry, the American taxpayers, we're in massive debt.

We have to cut. That's it. And you know what? I'm here for it. We're in so much in debt, just overcut and then let people reapply for their jobs. That's how much debt we're in as a country. Hey, Didi, thanks for doing your work and taking all the arrows for men. Thank you. On behalf of management and VCs everywhere, thanks for being a little rat and rat everybody. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks for taking the arrows. I was going to, you ruined my dismount. I was going to ask Deiddy, what percentage of men look could be fire and have it still worked as well as it does today. No, I think none of them actually. And then there's an honest answer, not both in the firm and in the portfolio. Startups just don't work that way. You know, you can't run a

resource constraint. No, my point was everyone thinks that their team is the one that doesn't deserve to get cut. That's fair. No, there's nowhere to hide at, I'll tell you something. When you're an under 50 person, under 30 person team, yes. There's generally nowhere to hide. Yes. And if you create a culture where you as the leaders put in effort, that's the number one way to manage this issue. There's nobody on my team who looks at me and says, hey, Jason doesn't work hard. Jason's fucking off, whatever. So, you know, then I have the high ground. If I'm working on the weekends and responding to founders on Saturday and Sunday and my team sees me saying over the weekend, hey, here's stories I want to do on Monday show. I set the tone. I'll tell you the problem is

when you're running one of these big companies and you're Zuckerberg and you're out in your place in Maui and then you're at your place in Lake Tahoe, I can tell you, I know the rank and file people at Facebook, who when he said, get back in the office, we're going back to the office, they were like, hey boss, you're in Maui. We know you're in Maui. You're sharing photos. So people know that, right? They look at their bosses fucking off and then they just say it's okay for me to do it. Also, people give overemployed a whole lot of crap. But I think David Sachs is now the leader of having more than seven jobs. True. He's got a couple jobs now. DD, thank you so much. We appreciate you. Do more. Thank you guys. I love you back on the show.

Have a good one. Thanks for having me. Bye-bye. It's a spicy issue, is it not? No, I love it because people want to come at this with a single thing. No more remote work or do this or that. But it's a lot of people, a lot of companies, a lot of different structures. There's no single answer to it. But now, Jason, we have today, everyone, you're welcome. We have an amazing second guest on the live news show. We are cooking.

And I get to say the following words on Twist. Haley Welch, the woman who went viral for the Hock to a phenomena. You do. launched a meme coin. And guess what, Jason? It has not turned out to be a blue chip investment. What? I know.

You're saying a viral star who launched a shit coin, it didn't go well and it hasn't replaced reserve currency or been an alternative to buying the QQQ or load a fidelity fund? Like you're so interesting? No, it hasn't outperformed real estate. state in a major booming city? Oh, wow, this is crazy. It might have if you flip it upside down and look at the chart backwards, but to help us understand this, we have from YouTube. It is CoffeeZilla himself. Hey, how you doing? My guy. I love CoffeeZilla. Coffee Zilla. Coffee Zilla is my Roman Empire.

I love Coffee Zella. If you don't know who Coffee Zella is, he has a YouTube channel. Yes. Where he looks for scams. And I was just talking about this Michael Seller stuff. I'm not saying that's a scam, but you know my OCD, Alex. When I get my hooks in something, it doesn't make sense to me. My investigative journalist comes out. Well, Coffee Zilla is a detective, right? And he has the same DNA as I do when it comes to this stuff. He sniffs something, he figures out, maybe something's going on that's not right.

And then he gets the receipts. And then he makes his little coffee Zilla videos on them. And they go super viral and millions of views. He is the backstop against fraud. Ladies and General, the one of the only coffee Zillow. How was that for that? That's way too nice, way too nice. I'm the backstop against the Hawk to a meme coin.

Nobody was going to stop it except for, you know, if I, no, I think this thing was a pretty transparent con from the get-go, you know, 3% of the tokens got allocated to the public. 17% unlocked day one, insiders sold for millions of dollars. And I just want to know where did that money go? Somebody had to make that money, right? it wasn't retail that made that money. It was a lot of, this is the problem, Jason, with a lot of this stuff is there's very little understanding about how these, the tokenomics can affect, they can kind of rig a launch

to favor insiders as opposed to regular people who are jumping in. The most unfortunate thing about this, and the reason I kind of beat my drum on it, because there are influencer drops, you know, seemingly every day now, especially as the bull markets kind of come back. The real problem is they kind of targeted. what they called normies in their death, right? And the guy, one of the guys, Doc Hollywood, who I think is like the son-in-law of Howie Mandel or something, he was saying in our Twitter spaces that, oh, like, you know, our audience, and I don't want to misquote him, but you can go find

it in the space. There's something to the effect of our audience is like, they don't even know what market caps are. They don't even know what the price is. And actually, that actually matters a lot, right? You know the difference between a sophisticated investor and someone who's just jumping jumping in for the first time. And there's a different expectation of the protection we give to those people. Okay. So let's step back here for a second, Alex. There is a concept of a token in the world. You buy a token and it's supposed to have some value. Sometimes those are utility-based tokens and they help power something. Like there's file coin that theoretically powers the utility of a cloud-based storage system that would compete against S3, you know, Amazon Web Services

story. And so, and then there are people buying what's called the meme coin, which means they're just speculating or maybe even trying to play the game of pumping and dumping coins. So now this has become like a gambling game of like, um, poker or risk or guts. So what were they stating was the purpose of this coin coffee zela? Was there, was there ever a stated purpose to the coin? Like it's going to do X in the world? I think in the call, I think he said like the great thing about meme coins is there are no promises. But we're going to build like a great community around this or something like that. That was Doc Hollywood, who seems to be more of the crypto connector between Haley Welch. I don't know how much the Hawk to a girl has like knows about crypto.

And I guess he was the connect a few months ago. He posted that he's giving a mean coin class or whatever. So you have all these guys who they see these influencers with huge audiences and they tell them like, hey, we're going to monetize your fandom, even though they said they're not going to, you know, we're not making any promises. Really, it's like, I think the pitch is we're going to build a community around this. Haley wants to like benefit the community. This is for her fans. I know they wanted to give away some free tokens to people who have interacted with her in the past. The problem is when you sell to insiders and those people are looking for a return on their investment, when this coin launches with all that hype and, you know, this, this, this,

girl, unfortunately, is using her influence to be the frontman, right? The brand. She's the face of the brand. It's a huge cautionary tale because, you know, she made $125,000, which is a lot of money. I think she has some back end, you know, when it unlocks and stuff like that and maybe 50% of net proceeds, if you believe her entertainment lawyer. But at the end of the day, the person taking going to get torched in this whole thing is going to be her and the guys who run this stuff, they're going to go to the next guy and they're

going to make the next guy the next influencer do it and so you know as much as i like to get the word out i don't like when people pump this stuff i do also like to give a cautionary tell to influencers you have to know what you're getting into it's a totally different game to shill a VPN fine god bless you you know whatever you want to sell a VPN use a VPN whatever you want to do yeah you use a VPN but if you want to sell people a financial instrument especially one that is essentially gambling. Would people lose their money? They're going to come for the head of the person who sold it to them. Understandably so. I think that's incredibly valid. But Jason's question earlier was made in good faith about what was the token for. But I think the problem is

that by definition, a meme coin is or a shit coin can't have value. Like who thought that hawk to a coin was going to be worth anything apart from a vehicle for near-term speculation? Right? I mean, what is it going to do? What is community? That is the most weasily word in crypto because people always talk about it, but mostly it just means speculative pump and dumps. Yeah, it means I don't want to actually give you a real thing. And especially when they say, oh, we want to decentralize our community.

That's just the word for, we want you to provide all the value. We want you to generate all the value for our community. We don't actually want to have to do anything. We want to decentralize our responsibility here. That's a great model, though. Yeah, it's a great model. Actually, you see a lot of a lot of things. People, when they're, they made promises and they want to abdicate the responsibility, they say,

we want to decentralize the promise of this community. And that's just code for we're never going to work on this again. We're going to decentralize it. I mean, fan clubs have existed. If you wanted to start a fan club, you could power up a newsletter, charge a hundred bucks a year for it. And people could be part of the newsletter. Plenty people do that. And sometimes the newsletter's value is a community where people chat, sometimes it's actual content and research done in the newsletter or it's somebody's opinion or art. You can do all. Patreon exists. So the way I know that this is a scam when I see these things is there are vehicles. CoffeeZilla, I don't know if you do subscriptions on your YouTube channel or you take donations, but people can do that on YouTube. Like if people

are watching live right now, you could give me $100 if you wanted to, and I guess YouTube take some percentage of it, whatever it is. There are tipping, built, into these systems and streaming platforms. There's Patreon. There's substack. You could use Beehive as an excellent way to do this. And it looks like you have one here. So this is like legit, real stuff in the world. And so why do the coin? If you're doing the coin, you know it's a red flag, red flag, red flag. Yeah, 100%. I mean, the other problem is, is that with all those other things you mentioned, there isn't this element of like, hey, maybe we're going to make you rich in this process. Maybe there's like this big upside for you because that is sometimes how they pitch it. Oh,

this is just a fan community, but we're going to market it a bunch. What does market my coin a bunch mean? That's code for maybe a bunch of people are going to go up. It's going to go up. So that that is the problem in a lot of this. Like you said, there are traditional ways to do this stuff. It is weird. We've had this blend between finance and like mainstream culture and the lines have been really blurred as far as what is. And we haven't had a lot of good regulatory direction as far as what is the security? What are the rules of the road? A lot of times the rules of the road are either not enforced or they're not there at all. And it leads people to like be in this weird gray zone, or they'll just go, they'll do it. This, this team did. They'll go offshore. These guys said,

hey, we wanted to do everything right. So we went to the Grand, the Cayman Islands. It was a good sign when you go to Panama or the Grand Cayman's to do business. What could go wrong? No red flags there. That's the strange thing. I was trying to figure out, where is this money going? So I said, you know, where is this? You guys made like over a million dollars in fees. You guys are making all this on the pre-sell. Where's it go? Oh, it all goes to the foundation. Well, who benefits from the foundation. Does Haley Welch on it? No, no, she doesn't own it. Okay, do you own it? Who's on the board of the foundation? Here's a good question. Who's the beneficial owner of the foundation? Also, a good question. So it's like the, that's the problem. They hide behind this kind of stuff.

And then, then he's like, you know, we have 18 employees working on the Hock to a meme coin. Okay, who are they? Yeah, who are they? Show me their LinkedIn. Also, do we need 18 people working on the Hock to a meme point? I have 21 people working here at this firm. You go on LinkedIn, you search for launch and this week and serve. You find the employee is. You could actually Coffee Zill could contact him and say, what do you do for Jason? You know, maybe some of them would talk to you. It is so obviously that there's scams going on here. But part of your cautionary tale is you have confronted these. You've gotten into them early. You've investigated them. You know how to do the on-chain research. And so for other influences who are thinking this is a way to make a quick buck,

maybe you could just chronicle briefly a couple of people who've gotten pinched, have gotten fines, whether it's fire festival, whether it's Jake Paul's coin. or was it Logan Paul's coin? I can't remember who you got into a back and forth with. I'm in a defamation lawsuit about that right now. So I can't speak about that one. I can't speak about, we covered Safe Moon. Safe Moon was a coin, which promised, you know,

to automatically lock up the tokens and you'd have this unruggable LP, and that turned out to not be true. John Coroni and two of his founders have been indicted. There are people in jail for that coin. I mean, there are real consequences that come from this stuff. There's a guy Jay Mazini who said he was going to buy Bitcoin from you at elevated prices that we covered extensively.

He's now in jail. So there are real consequences to this stuff. It does take a while. And the problem is it does feel a little bit like the lottery, whether you get pinched or not. Like it feels like, but you do need to. So this is my one problem with regulators is there's a bit like the cases take too long. And I know these guys are overworked or whatever. But just objectively, the cases take too long.

and the enforcement is just sporadic. It's more like getting a speeding ticket. A lot of people speed. Not everyone gets caught. Eventually some people do, but instead of facing a small fine, you may, you know, go to jail for this. So, and a lot of times, you know, to be honest, Jason,

these people, they get promised a lot. But a lot of the people who make the money are the like your crypto dev. You're the guys who've been in it and spun up like eight different coins. a lot of times they know the right way to do it. Like, if what Haley's entertainment lawyer said is true and she's locked up for a year, while all the pre-sell guys already have sold, it's clear it. It's kind of a, you know, that's kind of a bad news for her. She's a mark for them.

That's theoretically here. I don't know the details, but I think she's the mark. If I, my Brooklyn and me guesses, she's the mark. I've been asking for this agreement, though, and they won't give me the agreement. So I'm not going to say one way or the other definitively until I say, see that contract. Yes. But if it's true that she, you know, she made $125,000, I think she should either donate that. She should completely divest from that. That could be a speaking fee for her, personality appearance fee, right? And celebrities get those all the time. You know, this is where

Gary Gensler leaving the administration and they're going to have a new person who's, I think, committed to making a clear set of new rules for crypto. And that's really what needs to happen here. As somebody who's pro-technology, and I'm actually pro-crypto legally, crypto does behave slightly differently. And what would be really interesting here is to give a path to people to register these. And it would be very simple. You register it if your project is under a certain dollar amount. You get like an experimental license. You register and you have to have KYC, you know, know your customer and maybe a framework for how much each American is allowed to invest in these. So each American is allowed to invest up to 1% of their year.

early salary or whatever was on their tax return. If you had some common sense there, you could sandbox some of this innovation, allow people to do it, and lower the chances of people getting hurt, or as I've said over and over again, and I've been saying to the new people and the new administration, just have a test for sophistication. And if people took a test, Coffey-Zilla, I wonder if this would make you feel better about it. You had to take a two or three-hour test. You had to understand what a market cap is. You have to understand what a safe note is, or a safe note for tokens. It's called a SAFT, I believe. You had to know what diversification in your portfolios. In other words, took a four or five hour course, you answered a 50 to 100

person, 100 questions on how to make investments. You became sophisticated as an investor, like having a driver's license. Would you be okay with something like that that made it? So you were at least educated. So if you did participate in some lunacy like this, my belief this is lunacy, to sell a token that has no value, you would feel safer about it? I wonder what you think. Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, like, I think the heart of what you're getting at is If you know what you're getting yourself into, you should be able to, if you want to gamble and you know the risks, it's fine. And if you ultimately lose money, we feel very differently about that. Yes. Then right now, anyone can just buy a little bit of Salada on Coinbase, send it to their Phantom wallet. And they're investing in Hock to a coin five seconds later. And they aren't, you know, maybe they've just been marketed to on Twitter. They have like no idea what's going on or, you know, the insiders and all that kind of stuff. So I do think there should be some. framework. I don't know the exact. I haven't thought through. I'm more on the side of investigating

when it goes wrong. I'm not like, I've actually had, there was like this, this like House of Representatives, like a team that reach out to me. They're like, we're thinking about some like rules of the road. What do you think? And I go, guys, we're in the wrong path if you're asking a YouTuber. Like, I only go when things go wrong. I hope you guys are, are the experts on how to make things go more right. But right now, I think the heart of what you're getting at is there is no clear path and rules of the road for how this stuff works. And I think that's where everyone's getting into trouble because you do have marketers, not only to the retail investors, you've marketers to these influencers. I just had a guy not even in crypto, not even in finance, just a regular

where he comes to me, hey, I was offered like $100,000 to promote this like dog coin. Should I do it? And he has no idea what even he's promoting. He's just being offered a hundred thousand dollars. I can guarantee you most of his deals are probably in the range of $20,000. So that 5x, all of a sudden, he's thinking, well, this could be a big upside for my career, big upside for whatever. So I think there's marketing on both sides that's a problem. There's no clear rules of the road. People don't know when they're breaking the law and not to give them any cover or whatever.

I'm just saying, I think there's accountability on all sides here. I think there needs to be clear rules of the road. Personally, I'm a little bit like, do we need mean coins? Do we need? Is it important to our economy that we are investing in that? hat in the hat coins. Okay, no, I actually think it's better if we lift up things with value and we're not just always promoting an economy of speculative assets. I think that's actually bad for most people's like financial literacy. So I take it you will not be buying dog with hat or whatever else

is popping today. Here's Stephen, here's the thing that I'm stuck on. One of the best parts of your video on this and also a lot of the reporting that I read about hawk coin is that people People can go to the blockchain and see what's going on and call BS on them not selling and the pre-sale and so forth. The information is there. So at once, it seems that the blockchain and crypto are a great place to do fraud or scams. And at the same time, that you leave such a paper trail behind you, people can kind of like vet it more so than they can other things in the private market. So is it actually a bad place to do scams and fraud? Because it seems that you get caught if you do this.

Like, there's no way to like obfuscate your actions. Absolutely. Absolutely. Crypto is such an interesting thing because it's all pseudo-anonymous. So on the one hand, it's in some ways easier and in some ways more traceable. I don't know exactly how to explain that to most people. I think you just did. Pseudonymity means like you know there's an account or a wallet because it has permanence and there's provenance to it and there's tracked on this blockchain. So you know that wallet too. But you don't know exactly whose wallet it is. And so then it becomes a little bit of investigative. whose wallet is that? Did they run it through a tumbler and they have a hundred other wallets? So you can obscureify it, but there is a record. So, you know, it's fascinating, I think, in many ways. What I will say for influencers, you have to be thoughtful about where money comes from. And when you become micro famous to actually legitimately famous and everything in between, you will get offers. I get speaking gigs all the time. I would say about a third

of the speaking gigs I get offered are for scamps or things that I can. consider uncouth, like predatory. Let me put it in the predatory. And what people do is they will have a webinar or a seminar and they'll pay somebody like me or like the guys from Shark Tank do these all the time. You get paid 50 grand, 100 grand, 150 grand. You show up for commerce. They talk to you about angel investing. Hey, you invested in Uber. You arrested in Com, Robin Hood. You're a legit angel investor. Let's have a conversation. I go to that. I get paid 75 grand. I spare the bag. A hundred grand. Who wouldn't do that? And it's a fine trade of services. People are selling tickets to conferences or corporations want a high profile speaker, they'll pay an author of a book.

Totally fine. There's other group comes in and I then see what they're doing. They take pictures of themselves with celebrities, with business celebrities, then they go and say, hey, don't you want to be part of this? And then some mom or some dad from San Diego, you know, or from Middle America thinks they they want to be like me or another influencer or the Shark Tank guys and they want to be great at AngelVestment and they pay for a $5,000 course. and then they pay for a $25,000 mastermind group.

And then I hear about the back channel. You know how easy it is to figure this out? When people send me the speaking gig, I tape the name of the person's scam. I type the name of the person complaint. And boom, there's a gazillion complaints. They're all there. Just like these dopey guys who took money from the Russians,

they were like, I'm getting $100,000 per podcast episode. You have to look, especially when it's a lot of money. The more money, the more you have to ask the question of where, Like you said, where is it coming from? Ultimately, they're not just buying like a little bit of time with you. They're buying your credibility. They're buying your association. And that's what you have to watch out for. What I always tell people, because I have, you know, friends in the YouTuber space or associates who they like, they enjoy the jokes of it. They enjoy like the silliness of it. And all I say is like, there's nothing wrong. If you want to go trade on your own private account, whatever,

I don't care. You can be as degenerate as you want. Thank you. Just don't. Put it, just don't promote it as this sound invent. Nobody cares if you smoke cigarettes, but the second you start promoting it, everyone has a question, right? So it's like, nobody cares if you want to be stupid with your money. If you want to, if you want to gamble with your money, I don't care. I just like, do whatever you want. God bless.

I like to gamble. You put your stamp of a, right. But it's a whole different thing if you're going on there and going, hey, da-da-da-da-da, this different thing or whatever, this offshore shady gambling company. And so that's where the problem is, is that people need to. understand the credibility is huge and that's why they're paying you it's that money doesn't come from nowhere they know that with everybody they there's like a calculation of they have this many influencers this man some of them i've even heard of it like this many this is the size of their wallet

we estimate that the size of jason's fans wallets are like you know a hundred dollars i'm never selling out my fans everything i do is for free for the fans or for founders i just always have that as a rule i don't ever like charge people for stuff it's just it's like even cameos i do them for free. People will be like, oh, can you say hi to my grandma? She's a big fan. I just do it on my phone. I send it to them. I'm like, oh, can I pay? I'm like, give a donation to charity. It's fine. You know, and you can tweet that I did it free and that you did. Give a donation to charity. And then encourage other people to do it. Two things. Number one, everybody listening, go follow CoffeeZell's YouTube channel. It's amazing. It's important that people expose these things.

And I really appreciate the work you do. Please don't ever do anything yourself because I don't want to have egg on my face that you ran some scam, okay? Because you are the good guys. I need you to be pure. Number two, I have an assignment for you, if you're willing to take the coffee zilla. There is this influencer who is on TikTok called Joshua Block. I emailed you a link about it. He just released a block coin. This kid has, he's on the spectrum or something according to the reports.

And he's being, I believe, taken advantage of a by sycophants around him who got him to launch a mean coin. This guy, Joshua Block. Anyway, this guy, Joshua Block, I feel like he's being abused. He's drinking alcohol to all hours in the night, like in a really degenerate way. He's only a cup 23 years old or whatever, but he started as like a young kid on TikTok. He's got a big following. Please take a look at into this case of the block coin and what he's doing because I think he also is getting pulled into this. But I believe he's a victim because he might not know what's going on here.

And it might be having, you know, even more. I don't know if you've heard of this case or looked into it yet. Yeah. Well, there's another guy behind it that was, well, I'm just watching it. I watch a lot of stuff. And if it then rises to the, you know, level of me needing to make a video about it, I will. But I've watched it. And there's a guy who is a former pimp of women who now his name is Jason Eitzler, I believe, or Mr.

Baste is what he goes by. But he seems to be like, you know, kind of, for lack of a better word, sort of pimping out Joshua Block to do. He tells him to like to do all these different things. I think he was one of the guys behind this coin. He's the one promoting this, doing life. So it's a very sad situation that you bring up. I'm definitely monitoring it. As I'm monitoring a lot of these quotes, listen, when the bull run happens, my life gets a lot

busier. Yeah, it's full run time. It's back. All right. Everybody follow Coffee Zill. Thanks so much for coming on. I appreciate it. I salute you, sir.

Great show. Great show. Yeah. Oh, yeah, great show. Everything he does is magic. But I knew about Coffee Zilla because he did a series of videos on the rabbit, the AI device that Everyone was talking about earlier this year. And I thought his reporting was fantastic.

And so when we started to talk to him to come on the show today, I was like, yes. Well, we had the rabbit on here. I like the founder of the rabbit. He seemed like he was a good guy. I don't know the background here, but I need to look into that. And we need to, I think they just emailed us and said, hey, can he come on again and show you the progress of the product? So we're going to have him on again that founder, I hope. Well, I guess we should get the David Sachs thing out of the way.

I'm obviously great friends with David Sachs. We do the All-Lum podcast together. We've been friends for 20 years. I'll just say off the top. I don't know any of the details of this. It was breaking news. I found out about it when everybody else did when President Trump or President Elect Donald Trump gave his tweet about David now becoming the czar for AI and for crypto. I have to say, David's one of the smartest, hardest, hardest working, honest, ethical people I've ever met. I think he'll do an amazing job here. Don't agree with him on a lot of opinions. We fight about it, battle about it every week when we have a difference of opinion. but he is just, it makes me feel great to have him advising the president on these two issues, specifically because as we just discussed, crypto has a lot of bad stuff going on and a lot of potential. And this is a really hard one to balance. And then AI as well needs to be a free market, in my opinion. And we don't want to have overregulate it. So, and the memes are coming in hot and

heavy. So my first thought about this. One, I thought your, your tweet here's funny. I'm bringing this up, not because it's humorous, but because just to remind everybody, Jason has said emphatically on the show, he's not going to go work for the government. So I'm not going to worry about that. Yes. But here's a very kind of tiki-tacky question. Why is it AI and crypto in one job? That's a very, yeah, I don't know. That's a big portfolio for one person, given how much is going on. Sure. And also, I wonder what he's going to. to do because there are people in government who work on areas of policy and Trump has nominated, you know, the new head of the SEC is going to be pro-crypto. How much does he want David

telling him what to do or how much influence will David have? These are, yeah, I mean, it's these are great questions. I will say David has a lot of experience in both of these. Obviously, PayPal was the first digital money or for consumers that won that hit scale, I think, before anything. So a lot of experience there. Crypto is kind of like the, extension of PayPal and digital cat. So he's more than qualified there. And then as an investor in Kraft, he's done a ton of AI investing and is involved in that. So he's smart. And having a smart person as an advisor and this seems to be an advisory role. I actually don't know the details of it. So we'll find that in the coming weeks. Which is why that I'm asking. But here,

here's the thing, Jason. So I saw this and I'm not going to lie. I was not shot. I was not like, oh my God, what an enormous surprise. I was going to go right here, Jason, because Sam Holman of Open AI after David Sachs got the Tsar job. By the way, Tsar is Russian for Caesar, I believe. Essentially, it means a person who's handed a portfolio of things to chief. Yeah. Like the person in charge of it. There is a lot of divisions inside of Silicon Valley that are not, I think, super visible

outside of it. For example, there was a brouhaha earlier this year between the folks who believe in Parker Conrad more than David Sachs and the folks who believe in David Sachs more than Parker Conrad. And I think that that's very occluded outside. of those relationships and rooms. And the tweet that I just pulled up for us, or sorry, the post on X,

was Sam Aldman congratulating David Sachs. And then several people who are high-profile ex-users laughing at it. Yeah, Elon put a laughing emoji. I saw that on CNBC this morning. I mean, up to interpretation. I guess up to interpretation. I love, I love that CNBC has to look at Elon Musk emoji tweets. That's the world right.

But clearly, Sam Aldman is trying to, engender some good vibes with David Sachs. Yeah. And they're on very different sides of this issue. I mean, listen, people compete. Some people want more regulation. Sam has been super pro-regulation. I mean, if you're in the lead, you pro-regulation. If you're behind, you maybe want less regulation historically. Incumbents, it's called regulatory capture here Bill Gurley talking about all the time. And Bill Gurley's been very public about this in regard to AI. Like all these people who have a year or two-year lead want regulatory capture, and that's wrong, right? And this has been the Venoid perspective, to some degree,

Vinod Kosovo, he's been arguing for a more closed approach, keep it secure, keep it out of China's hands. What is he an investor in which company? I think he's an investor in Open AI, if I remember where he serves. Once again. When you're in the lead, you're closed and you want regulation, when you're not, boom. Or people who have an investment talk their book.

That's true. Yeah. So, you know what would be great is if everyone who's going to go work for Doge or anything else in the government, put all their assets and interests into a separate trust and left it alone for four years. I think that would be lovely because otherwise, I think we're going to have to play, you know, who was in which SPV that had capital and which company that then influenced the

blah, blah, blah, blah, it's going to get messy. Like, there will be all kinds. I would think that smart people, like really smart people, will be hyper aware of these issues. And I'll just leave it at that. No, I know what you're saying. I hope that your optimism and my slightly tempered optimism are both exceeded by performance. Because if you're working with the public purse, there are different rules.

And I think the people who are involved want to see less of the public funding the purse. I think they want the purse smaller. They want the regulations less. So if you just think about what's in the best interest of a free market, the people who are in my circles, and who are now surrounding Donald Trump, the group we're talking about here, they're all free market, they're all less regulation, and they're all for smaller government. So if you're aligned with that and to have less regulation and more competition and having consumers win, that's the vibe that you're seeing right now.

And trust me, the second anybody is benefiting in some personal way, it is going to be the height of the focus of the media, of the public, of the competitors, of the adversary. So I think it's kind of baked into the system that if anybody is trying to do something nefarious, it would come up real quick. It would be highlighted very fast. Well, I hope that the people of free market power who have congregated in Texas have the ability to make weed legal in Texas so that way all bothered to show up. It's been amazing episode. Do we want to close with a Twist 500? Let's do one quick one and we'll say the other ones for Monday. So everyone might recall that we had a founder on from a company called Dune. And I am adding

Dune to yield 500 because they are an excellent, excellent company. This is Dune. It is a blockchain data search company, two types of monetization, SaaS and usage based, raised $180 million. USV and CO2 are in there. But a small company, as we know from the show,

Jason, and one that I think is well positioned to capture upside from the current moment in the bull market that I talked about with Coffee Zilla. And so I'm incredibly excited about this company. I love their data. I could not live without it. So I think they are going to be big success. Okay, so it's Dune, and it's a blockchain data analysis platform that allows users to query

and visualize public blockchain data. As we talked about, you were looking at the Hocktua data for that coin. You might be able to find patterns, et cetera. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. And Union Square Ventures, my good friend, Fred Wilson, the founder of it, is an investor in this. And when he invest in something, it tends to be a really legit, great company that has a chance to be very successful. If you look at the returns that Union Square Ventures have, it's a really good.

It's extraordinary. So when we do these and we add somebody to $2,500, really looking at who the investors are is a critical part because, you know, they, they tend to follow a certain pattern. When companies become successful, a firm like Union Square Ventures might have been in early or might be coming in and competing for that Series A and competing successfully because they did Twitter and another great company. So shout out to that team over there. Yes. Shout out to them. Also, we need to have Fred Wilson on the show because I've never met him. And that would be a great excuse for me to get to, yeah,

with annoying questions. Anyways, this has been yet another busy, busy week here at Twist. We are back next week with even more. We have interview schedule, Jason. We have news to get through,

charts, earnings, IPOs, the whole thing. I think we're four days a week next week, too. And I'm hoping that we get our weekly AI with Sunny back on track on Tuesday. So I'm hoping for that. That I can sleep on Tuesday.

And it's going to be lovely. There you go. So we're Monday, Tuesday, time, 1 p.m. East Coast time. I'm on the West Coast now, so we start an hour later. So we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.