This Week in Startups - Google announces Bard, Adam Neumann’s business plan, Blue Collar tech’s moment | E1674

Episode Date: February 7, 2023

Molly and Jason discuss Google’s announcing plans to roll out its ChatGPT competitor, called Bard, in the coming weeks. (1:10) Then, they discuss Adam Neumann’s explanation of Flow’s business before wrapping up with a SOTD, Jobber. (18:59) (0:00) M+J kick off the show (1:10) Breaking down Google’s announcement of Bard (9:29) Coda - Startups can get $1000 credit by visiting https://coda.io/twist (11:00) Neeva’s approach to search (17:33) Linode - Apply to Linode's Rise program for up to six figures in discounts at https://linode.com/twist (18:59) An update on Adam Neumann’s Flow (36:31) Meowtel - Save $25 on your first booking with code TWIST25 at https://meowtel.com/ (37:53) SOTD: Jobber raises $100M (46:17) Microsoft officially announces the integration of ChatGPT into Bing FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

All right, everybody, busy, busy Newsday. There's a ton of stuff going on with ChatGTP, and Adam Newman is back with flow. He's back with flow. That's almost all we need to say. It's going to be a great show. That's going to be a great show. That's it.

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Save $25 on your first booking with code Twist 25. All right, everybody. Welcome to a Tuesday here. There's a ton of news. But yes, I'm up in Tahoe for ski week. And, yeah, just a lot going on in the news. Lots of the news. And we need to get some news in. We're going to do a little like sausage making because as we are recording right now, as we're talking, Microsoft is having a surprise event. which is reportedly about its open AI integration. So we have someone monitoring this at this moment. And we will bring it up if it seems important.

It does not seem like they're live streaming it, which is kind of weird. So we'll be like monitoring tweets. Yeah. Old school style. Well, this is all heating up. I saw yesterday. I think it was yesterday Monday that Sundar,

Pichai, the CEO of Google, aka Alphabet, did a tweet storm. And this to me, you know, we were sitting here, what, two months ago? And I said, like, I'm going to sell Google if these guys don't get their butts in gear and have something. And there was that email that came in, Molly. And the email that came in from somebody said, they've had this. They've had this. They've been sitting on it because they have issues with how it might be used, the quality of it.

I'm assuming legal issues. And they wanted to be judicious. about when to release it. And also, they thought it could put heat on them because of job destruction, right? Right. Like, if you're Google and you're laying people off, you're making tons of money, you're printing $20 billion in profits, like what are, do you really want to be out there killing a bunch of white-collar jobs that maybe some senators in Congress people, there are kids are in those jobs? Like, it's a bad look for America. Yeah, you're about to kill law school. It's kind of a big deal. Yeah, perhaps. So anyway,

there's the part where it's sentient. We probably shouldn't leave that out. So many parts here, but apparently that tip that we got that you heard here first was true. They've had this sitting there at Google and they've been sitting on it. And I guess chat GPT intelligently front ran the market and gave it to Microsoft. Microsoft gave them 10 Billy. I think a bunch of people cleared some private stock in a secondary sale probably.

So they got paid. And now Google, maybe we could take a look at this. Google. sort of being forced into action. Yeah. I mean, it's a very interesting, right? Like, you feel like their hand is definitely being forced. So the chatbot has officially been announced that they are going to start rolling it out.

It is, unfortunately, it's called Bard, which is not as cool. BARD. Google always does this kind of stuff. And then like the, there's the other, the one that they invested in, the one that Google invested $300 million in that isn't going to supplant their own AI is going to be called Claude, which is a cool name. And then you have Chat GPT, which is just like weirdly catchy.

It's got like a nice internal alliteration. It's fun to say. But they're going and Deep Mind has sparrow, which is awesome. And there's this called, BARD, which is short for Apprentice Bard. I would have called it Little Bird, like a little bird told me.

Which is why I like Sparrow. A little sparrow comes, whispers in your ear. Bard is like you literally let a neck beard developer name it. Like, that was the code name, Bard. Apprentice Bard. Somebody found out about it, but like, a poet? I mean, like, listen, I get it.

I get it. I'm a nerd. Yeah. But at some point, you have to care about branding. An apprentice bard is not good branding. However, okay, let's get to the point, though. We did, we did, Sundar Pichai did do this long Twitter thread about it. And it included, and I think this is the important thing, a screenshot of what it might look like when it's combined with search.

And what's interesting is that it's a, a modified Google thing, right? You still have links underneath. So what you see, for those of you who are not there, is like, at the top, there would be a prompt. Is piano or guitar easier to learn and how much practice does each need? Then you see the typical Google tabs, images, news, shopping, videos, et cetera.

And then this summary, right, the answer. Some say the piano is easier to learn as the finger and hand movements are more natural and learning and memorizing notes can be easier. Others say that it's easier to learn chords on the guitar. we are going to find that AI is going to irritating me, like never make a decision. It depends. Well, it depends. And then under that, you see the kind of graphic affiliate linking, the linking that so many publishers rely on, Kora, you know, some site that teaches you music.

Any content site, yeah. That kind of thing. Any content site. So really just incorporating it as a UI change. So a question comes in. to Google search we might see in the future, an answer given when one box came out, which is when they would take a snippet from a website. Totally.

So what we have happening here, let's call it what it is, folks. Google's AI, chat GPT and eventually bangs, and there's other ones, they are literally, instead of giving the one box answer, which was scraped, stolen, however you want to phrase it, if you're being charitable or you're being realistic, lifted, co-opted, from. and then link to, but of course nobody clicks on those links to the website, gives you the answer you're done. Right. And Google says, well, if you don't like it, you can opt out,

but you can't opt out of one box. You have to opt out of the whole search index. So Google knows what they're doing being cute there. Now what they're doing is having a language model rewrite the answer that some person or company spent their life, building up the scale, and now they're going to rewrite it and give you the answer and plagiarize it. I mean, you can 100% see. why Google has slow walked this.

Like, you can see why they didn't roll this out because you weren't here yesterday, but yesterday I talked about like, if you know anybody in media, if you know any publisher who rely, every publisher in the world now relies on links from Google. Traffic from Google. The homepage died. Yep. You know, RIP, the homepage pour some out a decade ago or more.

And now it's all about Google. And every time they change the algorithm or when they introduced one box, like all of that linking disappears. Traffic to these websites. A.k.a. Revenue disappears. And so you can see why Google would have slow rock walked rolling out the idea of just an answer. The lawsuits are being penned right now. Google needs to allow people two choices now. You can be in the index. You could maybe three. You could be in the index. You could be in the one box. Your content could be used in the answer. If your content is used

in the answer, they need to pay a licensing fee. And they need to use a citation. So if the answer comes from these 10 websites, each of those 10 websites is need to get a fraction of a penny for participating in the creation of that answer by the AI, and they're going to need to be cited. And the citations are going to need to be in order by the amount of copy you took from each one. So if you're clever enough to create this answer, you're clever enough to make a sharing revenue model, and you're clever enough to give citations. So don't BS any of us in the content business, Google or Microsoft. if you can build a chat technology this impressive,

you can come up with a way to share revenue. And to launch this without citations and to launch it without sharing revenue in a commercial environment is unethical, immoral, and these people need to be sued immediately. That doesn't mean I'm anti the technology. I'm not anti the technology. But Google needed to do this right.

Now they're doing it wrong. Lawyers, by all means, find out where this is being scraped. New York Times, Washington Post, content sites, everybody get together and start filing the lawsuits. And then you need to get in there and look at how these models were made, whose content they used. If they used Wikipedia, and that's Creative Commons, then they need to link to those pages. That's all those people want. They just want to link back and recognition. But if you're in New York Times and you spent money

on an article about which piano or guitar, which instruments your children, you know, learn first, and they just rewrote it, you stole it. And if you stole it, you need to reverse that decision. Make 2020 the year that your startup starts firing on all cylinders. Well, how are you going to do that? You're going to do it using CODA, C-O-D-A. Coda is here to help you do more with less. In Coda, your team can work on entire projects from start to finish,

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And Coda is the doc that brings it all together. We use Cota here at This Week in Startups. Hey, we track all my J-trades. Go to This Weekend Startups.com slash J-trading. And you can see all the gorgeous things a Coda page can do, pulling in data from different sources, allowing multiple people to edit it, seeing all the changes that are made to the page, the history, linking to other pages within your Coda instance, you can operate and collaborate in one place to get projects done faster.

And time is money, you know that. So take advantage of this special limited time offer just for startups. Sign up today at coda.io slash twist, and you will get a $1,000 startup credit on your first statement. I kid you not. Codda.io slash. Twist for $1,000 in sign-up credits, C-O-D-A.I-O-S-T-T-T-T-W. What's pretty remarkable about this is that we have, you know, the other, the thing that sparked

this conversation yesterday was talk of NIVA, the search, you know, the new, basically, search interface using this kind of answer providing that has a citation every sentence, a footnote every sentence that is talking about sharing it, and that is for pay. So you could imagine a universe in which, okay, so one, that exists, right? So Google, like, I understand that Google's hand is being forced here. They've had this. They have to commercialize it quickly. They're rolling it out.

But this is how Niva is doing it and they're charging for it. So Google could have said, we will offer a paid product in which you can just immediately bypass every other search result and get answers. Those answers should still include citations. I want to give Niva a shout out. Yeah. As you're pointing out here, they've taken each sentence that. been rewritten and they've given a citation. The first one, somebody asked Chinese balloon

shooting. Just three words. It's not even a question. It's just the words, the key words. In the first sentence, the U.S. military shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina on Sunday. Now, it's rewriting that, ostensibly, with China expressing strong dissatisfaction over the incident and then a second citation. Now, one has to wonder why they don't just put the sentence that CNBC had. Maybe they're rewriting it, Molly, I believe, in order to obscureify, in order to obscureify they're stealing. That's why they're rewriting the sentence.

Because you could just put the sentences together. This could be like four sentences. I mean, you know how I feel about this. And the way that I feel about this is that if we assume that the presentation of information in a slightly new form is always stealing and theft and plagiarizing, then we can never present new information. Like, you can't have search. If you assert that you must quote directly every single time. Okay. So if we are going to rewrite it, I think you need permission to do it at scale.

At scale, I think you need permission because you are interfering. And you just said search can't exist. No, search can't exist. You can show the link and you can do a small portion of the original work that doesn't interfere with that content provider's ability to make a living and to create derivative products. It is that person's right to create the derivative product, not a third parties. And so if you're going to use their input to create that output and you're going to do it at scale, and it interferes with their ability to take that opportunity, that's where in U.S. copyright law,

you're dead to rights. And so putting the citations is a step in the right direction, and then getting permission proactively from each of those is the next piece. And then the next piece after that would be sharing revenue or coming up with a licensing agreement with them, hey, we'd like to use you in this for every thousand answers we give, we'll give you $1. Right. Neva's paying publishers. It's paying, it started an ounce in 2021 that it would share at least 20% of its sales

with content partners such as Quora and Medium. That's too little, but okay. Probably do revenue splits with other publishers at some point. And it's worth note, we did say this yesterday, that the CEO was an engineering executive in Google's ads in commerce division for his last six years. there so he knows what he's going up against. I think like at some point, if you're talking about this as a new information presentation layer, and I think we are,

and I think that that horse is out of the barn, I will acknowledge any incremental step toward trying to do it the right way. And at least in this case, you've got Neva saying, we have an AI that is presenting information. You have asked it for information and it's giving it to you. But at least it is making, at least it is one linking to the sources, two, making an effort to share revenue, and three, more importantly, not just, like, it's not just a one, and then you don't know where.

It's one, CNBC, right? One, Reuters. Yes. The sources are presented well. Thoughtfully. It is accurate and thoughtful. And it's a paid product, and I believe that more revenue share is on the horizon. I am going to give, what's the name of this company?

Neva. And it's N-E-V-A? N-E, N-W-V-A. N-E-V-A. Everybody go there right now. Go check out Neva. And I want to give a shout-out to their founder and CEO and invite him to come on the podcast immediately.

A-SAP. Tonight. Tomorrow. I'm already paying for it. Let's go. Yeah. Six bucks a month. Because he has 78 employees, according to LinkedIn,

the world's largest network, LinkedIn.com slash angels slash jacians and stuff startups or whatever. And you're going to get something. Thank you, LinkedIn. LinkedIn owned by Microsoft shows they have 78 employees, but 78, and they're able to do this right. Oh yeah, and they raised like a teeny amount of 70-something million dollars too, like a teeny amount compared to the 300 million and the billion and the whatever. Yeah, Google should be doing this right out of the gate. I don't know why they wouldn't. There are more people working on bicycles for the staff at Google right now than are working at Neva.

If Neva can do it right Sundar If Neva can do it right Bing Sam Altman The two of you can do it right Do not come to me and say We're going to get to it This week I want it out

Sundar you got till Friday Well I'll give it you a Monday You get the weekend I want everybody in hardcore mode Lock the building down Everybody works 16 hours a day That's how we're doing it in Silicon Valley Now click this link

To prove your hardcore at Microsoft chat TP and Google. I want it done by Monday, 9 a.m. No more stealing content from folks, no more making money off the back of folks. If Neva, N-E-E-V-A,

Neva.com says Jason to get 20% off your subscription. I'm not a sponsor yet. I mean, honestly, after yesterday. Can do this. Yeah. Yeah. Microsoft and ChatGPT and Google can do it. And 78 people working here.

There's more people working. There's more people working. at the valet at Microsoft Headscorder. I literally, I guarantee you there are more valets at Microsoft parking, Tesla's, BMW, or Mach 5, mock ease.

Maches. Maches. At Microsoft, then there are at Neva. Get it done. Infuriating. Sometimes we get a partner where the offer is so amazing. I don't even need to read you the ad copy. I just read you the benefits.

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$100 in free credits immediately, and you can also apply to their startup program, Rise. And again, Rise members will receive up to $120,000 in free infrastructure credits during their first year and up to 50% discounts after that. Well done, Linode and Akamai. I mean, I so agree. And also, this is amazing. Yeah. Why are you doing it?

You're trying to trigger me. I'm trying to calm down this week, and I'm getting triggered. Oh, okay. Well, hey, I have an idea. I have a way to calm you down. Please. Let's talk about Adam Newman. Oh, I love that.

Rivka, why don't we ski today? Then tomorrow will work. Speaking of you have got to be flipping kidding me. Okay. You may recall that Adam Newman has his new venture called Flow, not to be confused with flow carbon, which he and his wife, Rebecca, are advisors in and investors in. And if you remember, Adam raised $350, $350 million from A16Z for flow. And we were like, well, it might be something about housing and it seems sort of real estate related and whatnot.

Okay. So he did an interview. He and Mark Andreessen sat down with A16Z's David Ullovich at the firm's American Dynamism Summit in Washington, D.C. They talked about all kinds of stuff, which I'm sure we're going to obsessively watch. Shout out to David Ullivich, friend of man. This summit focuses on companies that support U.S. national interest in aerospace, defense, education, and housing. And of course, flow is a big housing thing. So I think we should just skip straight to the clip.

The conversation is a clip. It's a clip. Okay. But we have one 57 second clip of Newman explaining how flow works, which immediately went viral. Here it is. So number one, management company branded technology first. Number two, real estate asset management, a company that can buy real estate and asset manage real estate.

Number three, financial services. And the fourth pillar is this mechanism that's going to take some of the value and share it with the value creators. And those users are going to start using our financial services. Now, the reason they're going to use the financial services, that payments company that's charging your rent already has a real relationship with the user.

And then if we are able to take this value-creating mechanism and share with the residents, a portion of the value, it's going to make them feel ownership. If you're in your apartment building and you're a renter and your toilet gets clogged, you call the super. If you're in your own apartment and you bought it and you own it and your toilet gets clogged, you take the plunger.

And it's the difference when feeling like you own something to just feeling like you're renting, from being transactional to actually being part of a community. I totally get it. You know, I like, I get Adam Newman too. I can explain this because I have some history in this space. Okay. I do have some history in the space.

Okay, I love it. I was an investor in a company that did the financial piece of rent, and it was sort of like a CRM. It got sold. It was very cool company. Anyway, putting this aside, it turns out a lot of people who are landlords, they are collecting checks, a very manual process obviously. And what some companies have done now

is they've made CRMs that help you pick somebody to rent the apartment, do the background check, and then you have like a wait list of people who you've said, hey, you know, there are potential people in the future,

then they put them in apartments, then that person can go to that site and, you know, do their payments. And you could come up with all kinds of interesting different payment plans for people. people could pay by week. They could ask for extensions.

You can give them loans. You can, you know, to pay their rent if they're a little bit short. There's all kinds of, like, interesting things you can do. And so the architecture he's coming up with of a technology services company was what he was supposed to build with WeWork, right? Right. But they got so busy with building it that these other companies that were doing very interesting software kind of beat them to it.

There were hot desk renting companies that would put up. a little device on each workstation. You would come to the workstation, Molly, you would scan it with a QR code and you would get charged per minute, or it would just manage your department and the number of people and the number of minutes you were using a desk. Very cool concept. And then you would actually know,

hey, nine lawyers from this department are in this office, 17 are in this office. They were at their desk for this many hours a day. A little micromanaging, but it was more for just kind of understanding your needs. And tailoring products going forward and tail, you know, like creating specific. products for lawyers, for example.

Right. Yes. And so now you've got this ability to manage space. And we have a company, Density.I.O that we ceded and it's done incredibly well. And they manage how many people are in each floor and the utilization of each space without cameras, which is kind of the cool part about it, gives you a little more privacy. You know anonymously how many people are in each floor, et cetera. So that part of the business is cool.

The part of the financial service is very cool. Those two things exist as verticals. The middle piece, just being a real estate management, that allows him to have real estate investors, not investing in the technology companies and probably have those two companies, the finance and tech could be kind of one cap table and the ownership of these buildings. And I saw when I was in Miami next to Citizen M was one of the buildings he bought, which was like a really cool building for apartments. They can keep those two cap table separate because real estate investors have a different goal, taxes and returns than technology companies.

So you just have this beautiful way of separating the two things out. The fourth piece is the one that's like, wait a second. They own the buildings and you have some ownership. You get equity in it. A lot of people have talked about that. That is at the core of. But we can't actually tell if it's equity. It's not going to be equity.

It's going to be shares in a company. The part that's very fuzzy is what he means when he says you get some value. And you have a sense of ownership. It's like not clear. And this is where this is where like yes to everything you said. Yeah. because you got some solid business in there. And then you layer on your Adam Newman thing with the very fuzzy part, the pixie dust,

which is like, and then there will be value and there will be a sense of ownership and there will be a community and maybe there will be like a clog token. And you don't know what that means. Is it rent to own? I would love to know that. That would be very interesting. I don't think rent. Is it equity in the larger entity in some way?

And then how would you recognize that? and how does that make you want to unclog your own toilet? Like there's, you know, right? Like you have an S1 and then you have some Adam Newman stuff on top of the S1. Easy for people to dunk on it and say he's, you know, this is like some weird thing. You probably doesn't want to tip his card. But if you think about it like employees at a company getting stock options in the company, if you're spending $3,000 a month on an apartment in one of the flow units and you spend

$36,000 a year and spend $200,000 over five years or whatever, and they gave you, I don't know, 5% of that in equity in flow for being a person, a member, and you have some ownership of the overall flow property. Kind of interesting to make them owners with just stock options. It's interesting. It would be like giving the Uber drivers or the lift drivers or the DoorDash drivers, which a lot of people tried to do, but securities law doesn't allow it very easily because of accreditation. But if they could have owned equity in DoorDash, that would have been incredible for the dashers. It's interesting to me if you, can create a financial mechanism for that equity that is similar to equity that you have in

a house. Like, I presume that that is the goal is to have a, to have a rental, because the big knock on renting is you just throw your money away, right? You don't build equity. And more importantly, you don't create this like sort of bank account that you can draw on. Like, if they're talking about a financial mechanism where you can buy into this flow community, you have equity in it, maybe you go back to the same financial institution to whom you pay your rent and you say, hey, I need a home equity line of credit.

Yeah. Against my credit. Then you can behave as a homeowner does in the financial world. Yeah. But so be a renter. And that is kind of interesting. But I don't know why you can't just say that. You know, because he is.

He just can't. Like, come on. He is congenitally, let me have this one dunk. He is congenitally incapable of just saying a straightforward thing. He, uh, likes to do a little bit of jazz hands and pixie dust. And I think that's like what I appreciate that about him. He's right about home ownership.

I know it's easy to dunk on him because he's bringing up a clock toilet. That is the truth of home ownership is if people have equity in their homes, that's why in America we've tried to do this. There's been a lot of discussion over do you build projects in a city where people don't have ownership in them or do you build, you know, entry level homes where people could possibly rent to own. And Adina's business is rent to own, correct? What's the name for business?

Sorry, I'm plugging on it. Divi. Divi. So, Divi is rent-to-own. I think what he's talking about, but he doesn't want to say the word rent-to-own like you're saying, because he's Adam Newman, and he has to say it in a way that makes you feel it's serious. It makes you not trust him.

It makes you trust, you trust Adina, but it makes you not trust him. But Adela is not, you know, but A16 isn't just like, sure, yeah, you seem great. This is a revenge startup. I think he's going to. I think his timing's going to be extraordinary. I think he's going to buy all these apartments on the cheap. I think people are going to want to come to an apartment. That includes a DJ and a party. I think he is going to nail it. I'm taking the other side. Don Julio galore. I mean, if he turned the lobby of WeWork into a party, what is he going to do with a pool area? I mean, he's going to crush it. These things, these things sound safe to live in when you start to, the way when you describe it like a WeWork, like, oh, great, that sounds great. I would definitely let my daughter go live in one of the way. I would definitely let my daughter go live in one of the way. I would definitely let my daughter go live in one of. of those?

Just saying. Young people in their 20s going out on the weekends and having a party, and I think it's like, it's okay. Maybe stay for it to stay home. I don't know. No details here, though, on when they're going to have an offering. No. There's nothing.

I know he bought a bunch of properties. Right. With his mass of money. I think a person bought a lot of these properties. So good for him. Yeah. All right. We'll see.

Yes, 3,000 units. What was the reaction? People were dunking, I guess online, people were dunking. I mean, this is where, this is one of those things that I find really interesting, right? It's like, first of all, the internet is built for dunking. Social media is just built for dunking. So anytime we got a guy talking about toilets and it kind of sounds, I'm just, I'm going to like make it not fun by breaking it down a little bit.

But, you know, it sort of sounds like this like super elite guy being like, yeah, I'm going to enable people to unclog their own toilets by feeling like they own something, but they don't really own it, you know, so you get this sort of like class warfare thing. And then also benefit of the doubt. Like, when you lose benefit of the doubt, it's harder to get your message across. And there are plenty of people who are like, no, this guy is a con man. I do not believe him. Even though at the fundamental level, you're probably right.

He's probably right. He's just made me the wrong messenger. He comes across as, you know, overly enthusiastic. if you're being charitable, like we say, you're on the program, or you can come across as smarmy or visionary or goofy. I mean, depending on the lens you're looking at it. You know, he's still, we work is still a verb. You get a we work.

You go to a we work. It is a going concern. Yeah, it's a going concern that's worth over a billion dollars right now. Probably, I mean, I might have been like a J-trade. And I bet that if I watched, I bet if I sat there and I watched the whole 45-minute interview like I did with the deal book interview, I would do a 180. Like I did last time, and I would just be like,

I ironically love that guy because he is, he is also like Rasputin-esque. He is hypnotizing. He is doing big things in the world. So for all the complete complaining or dunking, here's the reality of a venture capitalist's life and the capital allocator's life, public market all the way down to angel investors

and everywhere in between. You're looking for people who want to do big things and change the world. He wants to do big things and change the world. the world and he has done that. That is actually what you're looking for and you don't find it very often. So there's a lesson here. We actually do know that housing. We actually do know that housing is broken. We do know that. And we know that the trend is toward renting, but that renting doesn't accrue equity in a way that sets you up financially for the long term in your life. Like all of the, again, all the tenants, the tenants, not the tenants, all the tenants are true. They're totally

true. It's just like, do you believe him in terms of execution? But history suggests execution on some level is certainly possible. And then a grown-up will have to come in and tell you what the thing is. Here's a lesson for everybody out there who's an entrepreneur, right? Is this weekend start? Entrepreneur's lessons? It doesn't matter how badly you screw up. If you execute well, you build an incredible brand at a large scale, you can screw up. You could be Katzenberg. and do Quibi, burn through a billion dollars. And then if I can tell you right now, Katzenberg comes up with a new idea, says here's what we learned at Quibi.

Now we're going to build a Netflix competitor and an HBO competitor, and here's how we're going to do it. And these are the people we're tapping. Basically, he raises another billion. So the lesson here is to not be cynical to not project into this, you know, whatever, you know, social issues of the day,

unfair things in the world, housing issues, whatever it is, and look at the big picture. Capital allocators want to back people with a global vision who are bold enough to swing for the fences. That's the key takeaway here for entrepreneurs. For everybody else on, you know, for the people who are in the chorus and the audience who want to, you know, pontificate, if you're a professional pontificator, by all means, you have tons of attack vectors here. Dunk away. He's got his money and he's going to build it. Lesson for entrepreneurs. Like, go big.

He's in a build it. He's also, the flow brand is starting to get. It's growing on me. Rewark is a brilliant name for a brand. Flow is a brilliant name for a brand. He's a branding savant. Wait until you see the logo.

It's gorgeous. It's like a 70s logo. Yes, it looks like something like out of a 70s neon. It looks like a club on the sunset strip in 1975. It's like the hottest club. Here's what's happening. Is it pulsating in colors? Of course it is.

Oh, my God. Welcome to flow. Live life in flow. Soho's newest destination. They've got everything. God Julio, Icicle shots. The hottest thing in residential living is flow. Is incremental equity.

I mean, I do want to have a mimosa. Literally, I want to go back and look at. Oh, look at it's turning yellow. It's turning green. It's turning colors. It's literally like, I want to go. in a conversion van with the flow logo on the side of it, open up the back of the van and like 20 people come dumping out.

Right. Here's your job, folks. And everyone, you've got your Stanley Quencher mug, and you're wearing like your cute, like, Carhart Beanie. I mean, this is just like on point. This is all, this is, let's go. Bell bottoms, let's do it. Go back for any of you who are wondering where this take came from,

please go back and watch our interview with Sebastian Malaby, in which Sebastian Maliby is, you know, I can't imagine why anybody would fund this guy ever. And I'm like, really? And Jason's like, yeah, I would fund him for this reason, this reason, this reason, and this reason. And Sebastian's like, what? And I'm like, you wrote a whole book about the power line. You don't think that this guy's going to get funded again.

He's like, shoot. Yeah. Right. Sebastian 180 that real quick. You 180 that real quick. I was like, Sebastian, come over here. Come to the supervilly layer. Because it turns out like that, it turns out that Twitter does not have to give you the benefit of the doubt.

That's actually not what matters at all. No. The question is whether you get $350 million for basically. 16 Z. And are you going to throw a great party in Miami in Brickle, do a thousand people try to get into the party and do 50 of them say, you know what? I'll pay an extra 500 bucks a month for this apartment to get a couple of NFTs or tokens or, you know, shares and flow, whatever he gives people people, flows people, flows and flow. They own a piece of the company. He gives them shares and flow. And then what do they do? No, they don't have to go to the club. They're living at the

club. They go down to the pool and they get X number of hours in a booth at the club or what they call those cabanas? The mom and me is freaking out about this part of it. But yeah. It's like Solho House. What are people doing New York at Sohouse? Young people go to the house and sit by the pool and they order bottles of and they eat truffle fries. Yeah. Like hell yeah. Do it. Although you know this is going to mean nobody ever works again. Nick points out quite astutely that Twitter might actually be an inverse signal in of success. Like if Twitter hates it and they're all dunking on it, like head on in. I think that's probably directionally true. Yeah.

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All right. We have a startup of the day. Let's just do it real quick. Yeah. Let's cruise through this. This is really, really interesting. Jobber. Jobber.

J-O-B-B-E-R. A startup that enables small home services businesses just raised $100 million series D. This is not AI. This is not carbon capture. No box in. This is work. Straight up work.

Blue collars have a number. moment. Jobber is an Edmonton-based startup that provides an ops management platform for home services businesses, by which I mean like electrical, carpentry, plumbing. It helps you with a customer CRM, a super easy chat so that you can get like automated text and emails. Your electricians on the way. He'll be there in 20 minutes. Gives estimates, quotes, lets you schedule appointments. There's invoice managing. And then if you're a contractor, solo contractor, you pay 49 bucks a month, up to five workers, $129 a month and up to $15, $249 a month. The business currently has over $100 million in ARR and they serve 200,000 businesses in 60 countries.

So for those individual, I mean, it's perfect for both sides, right? Like one, you may be a phenomenal electrician who's not great at communicating. Like my plumber guy, I love him. We can't communicate at all. Like he comes and does light electrical and whatever emergency plumbing work and, you know, we kind of grunt at each other. tells me how much it costs. And I'm like, fine with that because I trust him. But if he had this layer, this interface to professionalize his operation, way more business. And then on the other hand,

everybody needs this stuff right now. Everybody needs this stuff all the time. We are at, back to plumbing, right? There's never a moment when you don't need access to this. Austerity measures can take you so far. I do not need to drink the blue bottle, chicory coffee for 450. Again, I was buying those, you. You know, every time we'd order groceries every week or two, you know, six, seven, eight of those would come in. I would plow through them. And then I looked at the bill. I'm like, hey, you know, and then I go to buy my own cafe de Mon and doing my own cold brew coffee at home, taste better.

And I'm saving whatever it is, 50 bucks a month on these things. Maybe like a hundred bucks a month I was probably spending on these things. Yeah, 100 bucks a month. That's probably doing 20. You know, if your plumbing backs up and as at the movement says, you'll plum it and you can't get it, you're going to call the plumber. You call the super. You know, you get the shit off the plum shit, Molly. You know, it is a lot of shit is backing up in your apartment.

You try yourself if you own it. Like, I'll try. I will definitely try. And if I can't get it, I call BB. Help me. You're going to call. You're going to call out and I always make him a coffee. Tell you what.

Of course. He gets a copy every time he shows up. This is what I trained my team to do. Anytime a service person comes, not only do we make him a coffee or give him a drink and we have drinks there, we give him. We give them sodas for the road, a road soda on the way out. Totally.

We hand them like a tray of stuff. Hey, take two or three for the road. We order them lunch. We say, and I gave the script to my team. We're ordering Shake Shack for the house. Jason said, we had to order you guys, shake shack too. Would you like a chicken sandwich,

which Jason thinks is the best thing on the menu, or the double cheeseburger, which Jason thinks is the best thing on the menu? Which one would you prefer? I'm like, I don't know. And like, we'll get you both. We buy 30 bucks worth of shake shack, we hand it to them. And they take it home, they eat some, whatever.

Who comes first when the toilet's backed up where there's a flood? Exactly. And you can cut things with austerion measures, but you're not cutting the air conditioning being broken in Texas or Florida. I can tell you that. Hot water heater? Can't live without hot water. There's so much stuff like this that just needs that layer of accessibility.

And I just think that this is, and, you know, I mean, I just keep saying, the electrician is the most important job in the world right now. Do you know what they're making? I mean, you can make six figures easily as an electrician. My brother Josh was an electrician, and New York firefighter retired is doing electrician work. They can make a fortune. You raise your rates. You don't lose any customers.

And the number of states that are at a deficit right now, you can go live in Hawaii, Florida, Texas, San Diego, Alaska. I just pulled up, like which states need the most electricians. It's like Hawaii, Florida, Australia, I'm sorry, Austin. You can go make more than a startup employee in these places. And you might, and you can set your own schedule too. You don't want to work Fridays and Monday. You just want to work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and you want to put in 12 hour days.

Do that. You have, by the way, you have all of that and your union. So you have all of that and you will be taken care of if you get hurt on the job. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Big time unions. I mean, this is, again, this is any minute now, I'm going to write the whole.

entire newsletter that is in my draft's title, don't learn to code, learn to wire. Like, this is the blue collar moment. You can, especially like key to the energy transition. Oh, right. How about that piece? No, like, solar, windmills, you can't do. Tables to connect the electricity. Exactly.

Like, we literally cannot accomplish an energy transition. You cannot electrify your house. You cannot get a car charger put in. You can't get the panel upgrade. You need electric. We need electricians. Like, we need like a freaking peace corps. for, what was that, what was the American, like the work thing, the labor core and the whatever?

I know what you're talking about, yeah. It was like a Clinton thing in the 90s. Yeah, America works kind of thing. AmeriCorps. We need AmeriCorps for electricians. This is why I think we should do these, we should tie school loans to professions. If you go to electrical school, you can actually get a loan against your tuition, no problem. an ISA, income sharing agreement.

So you can get ISAs for nursing, for plumbing, for electricians, no problem. Whereas if you, and code school, but if you go to get your liberal arts degree or whatever philosophy, you're going to go 200K in debt. Oh, see. Here's where I now think that we're going to move to the polls. Because I think actually a philosophy degree, a humanities degree, like, that's going to become increasingly important. Like, do you have data science schools starting to integrate that?

because the only thing we can do now that the computers can't is infer, be creative, make conclusions, you know, creative writing, whatever. So I think you'll have this like, you got, we need electricians, we need plumbers, we need all of this stuff. We need thinkers and dreamers and inference makers. And then in the middle, we don't need accountants. We might not need lawyers. Like there's all these.

We don't need coders. Like you don't need to code. I think you're going to need less. I think there'll be like 10. It will turn everybody into a 10xler. I'm not being so literal that we need zero. I'm just saying that all of the things that we think of as technical services, a lot of those technical services will get hit hard.

But if you're a creative, there's still going to be a ton. I think we will return to a ton of value there. Maybe. I was just thinking like I want to put a J-trade into show. Maybe the audience can help me with this. Email producers at this week in Startups.com. We're the stock photography libraries. I think that's over.

Like, why would you take a stock photo? If you need a photograph of a mountain, a ski mountain, I think you're going to get a better one from the AI than from a photographer. I'm sorry to photographers, but I think you'll get, if you're the creative and you want your website to have a picture of a, you know, mountain during Christmas and you want to have a picture of a beach during the summer,

you know, going to Getty and paying 500 bucks or $5,000, take out your credit card, it's going to be so much friction. and going into Canva or another tool that incorporates AI because obviously Canva will have stable diffusion built in and you're just like,

fill me a website square space. Right. With a beautiful sunset and I would like to have a bunch of those little huts that you walk out on a dock and you can, you know, I want to have a great white shark.

Oh yeah. I'll make the sunset more orange and it's just going to be like, boop, boop, poop, boop. And it's going to be faster and free. Yeah. And going to Getty and logging in, and searching.

It's going to be harder to find that image. You can just define what you want. Speaking of which, before we toss, quick Microsoft update, Microsoft did, in fact, in a hastily pulled together press event today, officially announced, although we've been telling you this for weeks, that they will integrate OpenAI's GPT software into the Bing search engine. They did a launch an event to launch the technology today, Tuesday, and said the Bing upgrade will enable a new kind of search in which people will pose questions

to the search engine in natural language and it will generate direct answers. I think somebody's got to buy Quora right now. I saw Cora. Well, I think Adam from, I've tried to get him on the pod a bunch of times. I've never heard him on another podcast, but I want to get the guy Adam from

Cora on the pod because they're doing something where they're going to allow people to license the answers on Cora that they got from users. That opens up a can of words. So those people who answered there, they don't have any expectation of getting paid. They did it for fame and to be helpful and recognition.

So maybe they get a link back. But I think they're going to let people access Quora's API to tap those answers. But I think right now, why is Microsoft and Google not just offering like a couple billion dollars for Quora? It seems like that's a gold mine of data. And if you could block the other person, this could be the next trend is buying datasets and blocking the other person. So if I buy Cora and I'm Bing or Microsoft, then Google can't. buy it, right? I mean, this is the nightmare scenario.

Exactly. The nightmare scenario is these wild garden data sets. Like, this is what an open AI as it was conceived would ideally have done. And yet, here we are. Here we are. Or you license it to both. And they buy a 10-year license, but then they have to rip it out, I guess, at some point. It's got to be, I guess, in perpetuity.

Producer Brian makes an amazing point here, which is that the FTC, if they are not already, should be paying a lot of attention to potential acquisitions around giant datasets. They're still busy fighting. They're looking at double-click 15 years ago and Instagram 15 years ago. They're like-

They're running the last battles. Where is the FTC? Like, Lena Khan, you should be in the audience at this Bing Microsoft GPD event. I mean, we don't know that she's not. One thing I do hate about us in the chattering class is we do, we are always like, they don't know what they're doing.

Like, we don't know. We do not know. I mean, they filed about double-click. Lawsuits take forever. The law takes forever. I know, but they're pointing the gun at like, you know, a deer that went by 15 years ago. And it's like, wait, they're not, they're not suing over the acquisition. They are suing over what the ad network became, the fact that it's the publisher, the platform, and the, you know, the sales arm.

Understood. But they approved it. So how do you go back in time and say, we're going to disapprove it now and here's what happened? I don't know how that flies in the courts. And then you have at the same time, Uber's building a billion dollar a year business. Amazon's built a multi-billion dollar ad business. Netflix is building a multi-billion dollar ad business. Hulu's building a multi-billion dollar ad business.

Like, I think the damage that was done by that was done over the last 15 years, it's not going to happen over the next 15 years. They're going to be losing market share to those new ad networks. This is where they should be focused, is whose data sets are getting used. And all I'm saying is we shouldn't assume that they're not. Hopefully they are. Right? Like, had this team been in place when Google was buying double-click,

maybe they would have brought the lawsuit, right? They're a lot more aggressive. So let's just not assume that they're definitely dumb-dums with their heads in the sand. We don't know. I don't know, dumb-dums. They might be with their heads in the sand. They might be focused on this other thing or they might be a resource or whatever. I was just going based on the action.

By the way, we didn't discuss this, but, you know, they blocked successfully. or I'm sorry, meta, FTC lost the antitrust challenge. Yeah, from meta buying that like tiny little virtual reality startup. I mean, to be honest, like this is why you got to read that chicken shit club book.

It's fascinating because it literally is about why, by Jesse Eisenger, it literally is about why the DOJ and SDNY and all of these federal prosecutors stopped bringing cases because they didn't want to lose. So they didn't bring cases. They did not go out against the Google and double-click merger because they were afraid they might lose.

And Lena Kahn has been very clear in saying, we are going to pursue cases that we might lose because it's the only way to win. So it's a really different and specific strategy, and it did become part of the like prosecutorial world in the federal, especially in terms of prosecuting white collar crime. So they're going to lose. You didn't bring a case. The chicken shit club,

while the Justice Department fails to prosecute executives, July 2017, this came out. Jesse Isinger. I have to check that out. I didn't even like that out. It's fascinating. All right, everybody. That's your Tuesday.

Got a lot coming up. Joe Gabia, Airbnb co-founder. I'm going to interview him about his new ADU, backyard unit startup. Oh, yeah, we talked about that on the show, a startup of the day. Oh, exciting. That's going to be fantastic.

I met him socially. I hung out with him a couple times. He's a really cool cat, like a designer, but he really thinks differently. I'm kind of a Joe Gabia fan. And so I'm really excited about that. And then you have some climate startups coming up and some climate investors coming up on the show, right?

We do. Special series coming up with my, climate is returning. Climate is returning. We have a partner came in to do that, yes. Yep, exactly. And if you would like to be a sponsor of the ongoing special series of climate startups, because people actually really liked hearing about them, it's hopeful.

We like a little hope. People who are solving real problems. Those are coming up. Yeah, we're really leaning into interviews this year in 2020. And it's super fun because it's just so like, it just opens up a whole world every time we have one of these conversations. We'll still be doing news, but we're adding back to. Clearly.

We got Molly and I, year one, we got into news. We got into news. It's a lot to discuss, a lot going on in the world. But we got to get these interviews back. There's so many great people. If you want to be a partner and you want to sponsor this week in climate, we're doing it as like 10 week series now. So jump in there, email producers at this week in startups.com.

Tell us about your company and maybe you could partner and sponsor the show. All right, everybody. That's a Tuesday. That's a Tuesday. See you tomorrow. Yeah. And subscribe to mollywood. com.

Oh my God. Can I just say? You did one this week. I did one this week and I was like, yes, you can start a climate company because everybody's talking about starting AI companies and I was like you can do. And I got an email from someone who said, I'm super inspired and I want to start a climate company. Can we talk about founder university?

Boom. Nice. Yes. I put a nice big link in there. I was like, we have a place for you to come and get started. All right. everybody. See you tomorrow on Wednesday. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.