This Week in Startups - GoPuff & Fast trimming staff + Bradley Tusk on tech regulation + Glimpse Co-founder Akash Raju | E1424

Episode Date: April 1, 2022

First Jason and Molly discuss instant delivery company GoPuff and 1-click checkout company Fast making layoffs (2:22). Then, Bradley Tusk of Tusk Ventures joins to discuss Uber’s Taxi strategy in NYC, sports betting and tech regulation (40:06). Then in our Ok Boomer segment Rachel talks to Akash Raju, co-founder of Glimpse, brands pay Glimpse a subscription fee for the products to be featured in short-term rentals (1:36:47). (00:00) Jason and Molly intro the show (02:22) GoPuff to layoff ~3% of its workforce to cut $40M in costs ahead of IPO (11:43) Ourcrowd - Check out the deal of the week at https://ourcrowd.com/twist (12:56) Red flags with GoPuff story (26:22) Boast - Get your R&D tax credits without the hassle at https://boast.ai/twist (27:42) Fast considering layoffs, trying to find buyer, fail to raise at two different valuations over past few months (38:02) Coda - The All-in-one doc for teams, get a $1,000 credit at https://coda.io/twist (39:18) Introducing the Bradley Tusk interview (40:06) Bradley Tusk of Tusk Ventures joins to talk about Uber and regulation (57:05) The future of gambling (1:26:00) Psychedelics (1:36:46) OK Boomer intro - Akash Raju from Glimpse (1:37:47) OK with Producer Rachel and Akash Raju, CEO + Co-founder of Glimpse FOLLOW Bradley: https://twitter.com/bradleytusk Check out Bradley's companies: https://www.bradleytusk.com FOLLOW Akash: https://twitter.com/akashraju4 Check out Glimpse: https://www.tryglimpse.com FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

All right, everybody, it's Friday Variety. Let's go, people. We got a big show for you. What do we got first, Molly? First up, we have news in what will not be the last segment like this. We have two high-flying startups that are reportedly about to announce some layoffs, possibly for very different reasons. So we'll break that down.

Yeah, a lot of lessons here. It's time to sharpen your pencils and get to work, founders. Because, as we're seeing with fast and go-puff layoffs and raising rounds of capital is getting much harder in 2022. And then next up, we have an amazing interview with Bradley Tusk. He's back. He was the venture capitalist who helped Travis and Uber navigate regulation. And we do an amazing interview with him. We hit a lot of topics. Molly, what topics did you enjoy? I mean, I'm just so fascinated by his sort of central thesis as an investor and also a long-time political operative that startups cannot ignore regulation. They have to play this game because

governments can make or break markets. So interesting. Gambling and even we get into psychedelics and ketamine therapies. And Bradley had some interesting experiences and thoughts on that. And then we wrap up every Friday with everybody's favorite segment, OK Boomer from Rachel reporting, our producer Rachel. Reporting in the real world, it's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR-C-O-WD.com slash twist.

Boast If you're a startup developing new software or R&D, you may be owed up to $250,000 in cashback from the government. BOST helps you get that money quickly and easily. The first 50 customers will get 10% off their first year by mentioning promo code Twist at boast. com.A.I.S.T. And Coda is the all-in-one dock for teams. If you've got a stack of niche workflow tools or if you're buried in docs and spreadsheets, Coda is the dock that brings it all together.

Startups can get a $1,000 credit at coda.io slash twist. Hey everybody, it's Friday Variety Hour. We have a great interview today. As you heard us say, we've got a great OK boomer today, but also just settle in, pour yourself a glass of wine. It's going to be a thick boy show because there's also a bunch of interesting news out here. Lots of news. What do you want from us? It's just all so good.

Yeah, people say they want the news. Other people say they love the interviews. And, you know, what we try to do is give you a little bit of both. And you know, six days a week to choose from and just put us at the top of your cue. And Jen, just listen. It's so much important stuff for you to learn about. And I think this first story is super important for founders to really think about. And it's pencil sharpening time.

So why don't you cue us up on the go puff story here? Yeah. So you know that we had the gopuff CEO on the show not that long ago. And what was so interesting about that is the conversation about how deliberately this company had grown, how, you know, responsible it was being in terms of developing this business. which is a tough business, as we know. GoPuff as a reminder is an instant delivery startup that delivers in an average of 15 minutes. They have their own micro-fulfillment centers.

They're evidently looking to raise something like a billion dollar round. However, the news this week is that GoPuff is planning to lay off 3% of its workforce to cut $40 million in costs ahead, potentially, of an IPO. And the IPO is, of course, where they hope to raise that billion dollars. Yeah. And so we talked about this. Govuff is in the instant delivery startup space, trying to get that 15, 30 minute window. If you're in a city, maybe it's 30 to an hour, you know, in the suburbs. And they have 15,000 employees. They're laying off 3%, about 450, according to this story. And they raised $1.5 billion in a convertible note valued at $40 billion. What we all know is that puts them in the growth category for tech, high growth. growth tech and high growth tech has been repriced. So the real price of the company may be 10 billion right now, maybe 15 billion. In other words, they've got to rebuild their valuation because they're not worth as much as DoorDash or two-thirds of what Uber is worth or I'm not sure Lyft's valuation

now, but I think it's 10 to 15 billion for a while. So in the private markets, people can get excited, right, Molly? And they can make a big bet. They might have protections there. So if the valuation goes down and they raise this $1.5 billion at $40 billion, those people are going to get their money out first. They'll have a ratchet, they'll get more shares. They're protected. So they got this sky high valuation, which looks really great in the press. But now that the market's corrected, they're going to have to use this $1.5 billion to get your profitability and the public markets want profitability. And it was a very hard juxtaposition for and a pivot for Airbnb Lyft, DoorDash, Postmates, and Uber to shift gears and say we're going to go from high growth to high growth, high growth, losing money to high growth, breaking even and a path to profitability.

And look at the work that Uber has had to put into this for five years, you know, four or five years, DoorDash for years. And so, you know, this actually reeks of competence. and maturity. Really? For me, it does. Because the market has changed in a very dramatic fashion. So this is as if you're the pilot

and you're just going really fast and flying low. And now you're like, hey, we need to conserve some fuel here. So let's go 55 miles an hour. Let's conserve fuel. Let's get to the destination. And let's make the company look like what public companies

are being rewarded in the public markets. Every time Uber or DoorDash or Airbnb start hitting into profitability, dipping into profitability, more people want to own the shares, right? And that is the story of high growth, private to public and that transition. So I think this is competence and probably unnecessary if you think about it, right? Because it's only 3%. So you're like, do they really need to do this? They're sending a message to internally.

they're sending a message to public market investors that we're going to be disciplined and even though 3% makes no sense, like 3%, you can't raise another, whatever it is, 100 million on top of the 1.5 and absorb these losses. No, we're just going to do what's right for the business. That's what it says to me is they're trying to communicate

to the market. We are competent. This is stone cold, Jason. Stone cold. Because let's be, let's remind everyone it's 450 humans who are getting canned here. But the plan layoffs, some more details about the layoffs, the planned layoffs follow a hiring freeze earlier this month. And, and this is kind of interesting, the resignations of several key executives.

The job cuts are part of a broader organizational restructure. This is all according to the information and are likely to focus on top earning managers outside GoPuff's core delivery operations, the person briefed said. Now, I have two questions for you. One, I can completely understand the argument that this show. some discipline that says we are keeping our costs under control as we had to the public market. Given this company's focus and we'll hear, you know, just a throwback from CEO, what was his last name, Raphael, in a minute talking about their sort of Ilishaev, thank you, Raphael Illeshirev, talking about the company's focus on discipline, profitability.

You know, like he was like, we built this company so intentionally, so deliberately, we took a really long time to get where we are. How do you have 450 top earning managers outside the core delivery business to lay off? Like, is there, is it just a market change or were there some maybe missteps? Well, what probably happened was the market was so hot, money was so cheap that they were able to raise a lot of money and they might have had special projects going on, think product extensions. new products and services that would, you know, maybe drop a year from now or two years from now. So, you know, if you took like Airbnb as an example, they launched experiences at some point, right? And Uber launched Uber Eats at some point and Uber self-driving, their self-driving unit, and they also have the trucking unit, right?

So when the market contracts and people say, hey, listen, we need you to be more profitable, You're going to look at those second, third, fourth businesses that you're developing in the laboratory and say, you know what? Let's take those off the table for now. Let's focus on the core business and let's make sure everybody understands that that business can, in fact, be profitable and what that looks like. Because people are going to give us no credit. So if you're an environment where people are giving you no credit and they want you to prove it to them before they buy the shares, well, you're kind of put into, you know, a bad situation. Now, there is also this concept of never waste a crises. It's quite possible the board sat down with the founder and said, listen, we don't know what's going to happen.

Maybe the IPO window closes. We're not able to IPO. Maybe you got to keep this thing private for another five years. And then the IPO window opens up again. It could be a recession next year. That's what indications are showing. We don't want to go public in a recession. We want to use the recession as a chance to grow market share and do it quietly without people understanding what we're doing.

So the IPO is maybe the IPO is off the table. for this company right now. Maybe. And if that's the case, then they're battening down the hatches. And if you think about any company, getting rid of the bottom 5% of the company in terms of performers gives an opportunity for those other people to rise up, take more responsibility. If you get rid of the bad managers, every company could universally get rid of three, four, or five percent of their employees in a very disciplined fashion and perform higher.

That's just management theory, you know, and it's when you cut people that gives other people opportunity, the company functions better. Now, there's a human side to all this, and you brought that up. It's very quick for all of us to be like, oh, what about the people losing their jobs? In this case, in tech, it's almost universal that you get an obscene amount of severance when compared to the average Americans severance. When you get cut at a fast food restaurant or working in a factory or any other job, you might get a week or two weeks for every year of service, if that. Yeah.

Tech workers who don't need the money in almost all cases and have five other job offers and getting recruited like crazy in today's environment, get three or six months to go to Bali or go surfing or snowboarding or some bull. So like when people are like, oh, but what about the people being laid off, you don't have to worry about that tech. I worry about people being laid off in a factory that's shutting down permanently in Detroit. Those people we need to worry about. Very fair point.

And on the plus side, they are getting laid off now before this recession that we're all manifesting into being actually occurs. So hopefully they'll be in a good position. It's time for another R crowd deal of the week. Right now, you can join R crowd's investment in EDUNAV. According to the deal memo, EDUNAV's patented technology uses machine learning algorithms to guide students along the optimal path to graduation.

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Red flag, red flag, red flags. I would like to discuss with you. One. Yes. GoPuff has had, as I mentioned, these three high-level executives. resign recently, including the SVP of product and growth, the VP of Marketing Solutions, and the director of partnerships. And of course, this is all happening in the context of Instacart having major pullbacks, saying effectively we're not going to IPO and we're repricing

ourselves. You have other sort of food delivery. You have zero grocery, sort of abruptly going out of business. Are there larger questions about the management, possibly, or just faith in this business because grocery delivery, as we know going back so many years has never worked as a business. We don't know if these resignations were voluntary or they were,

you know, walked up to the edge of the cliff, you know, holding hands and told to jump. So in order to save face, what an executive team will do is they'll say to, you know, people who are a vice. presidents or senior vice presidents like this.

Hey, listen, it's not working out. We both know that we're going to be eliminating your position and we're going to go in another direction. If you'd like to resign, we will give you your year of options and you'll get six months of pay. If not, we're going to fire you and you won't be getting those things. And then here is your agreement and just remember, you know, non-disparagement and non-disclosure and private information.

So if you want to sign these and get the six months and have your options vested till the end of the year, feel free. If you don't, you're fired as of today. So this is typically how these things get framed. So don't be surprised if it's not that there's like a legion of people walking out the door. It might just be they could have been mutual and framed as resignations to see. Or they're cleaning up. Right.

Exactly. They're just cleaning up. I mean, it seems like most likely, again, given like, remember, and this is why I almost want to play this clip, we were so amazed at Roth and how deliberate he was. And what a careful business builder he was. And so it is most believable, at least based on our, right? Like, if we bought the pitch in the room, it's because this guy seems so freaking competent. So it is most believable that they're cleaning up. Yeah, competent people have to do layoffs.

Competent people have to fire people. Competent people have to do reorganizations. All of this can be true. I think, you know, when the press gets their hands on something like this, sometimes they will take the worst interpretation about it. And the information they're getting is from the people leave. So the people leaving or this is a mess, you know, what a disaster. This company will never work.

You know, and maybe they want to, they feel rejected leaving the company or they weren't needed. So, you know, you know this as a member of the press, you will get all the bad stories. Yeah. And the people who are staying there or the PR people are trying to spend it as like normal course of business. Truth, probably somewhere in between. They may have grown a little bit too fast.

And it's because it's a hard business. And it's a hard business. And it's a, I think a first time or second. second time founder, a young founder for sure. So they're also getting their legs under them and learning how to do the job. First time found. Oh, right. He found it in college.

So let's play. Let's play the cluster of mind ourselves. Like, I'm so glad we did this interview because he's, you know, they're turning into such a newsmaker story and it gives us that that extra context that is missing in these reports today. Let's play this interview of Roth talking about profitability in different markets being a core value of GoPuff. 29 seconds. Great. It's like, we're not going to operate.

and lose money forever, right? This business was built on the tenets of really, really strong unit economics and profitability. So we're not going to go out and open up markets and lose money for years and years and years, especially on a unit level and not produce a profit on a unit level. So we're examining all of that and kind of every market that we're entering into and kind of making strategic decisions along the way and what makes most sense to vote for our customers first and foremost and then to how unit economics play out. And then he also went.

When we asked him, producer Justin, reminding me when we asked him what he was worried about, like what keeps you up at night about your business, he said he was worried about making sure the right people were there with the same scrappy mentality that made them successful. And that may be what he, that may be part of the layoff process here. It could be multiple things at the same time. Hey, the market is slowing down. We're going to have more scrutiny in the IPO. People are not suspending disbelief. A lot of these SPACs were so outlandish in their projections and optimism that the SEC is getting involved. you know, all these incredibly strong companies are being repriced.

And we're in a space where Uber, Lyft, DoorDash are, you know, being put in a holding pattern until they hit profitability. Okay. We need to prove it to the market. And he might have just said, you know what? The logical thing for me to do here is to get rid of the people I may have hired too fast who are not scrappy enough and who want to just spend money like, you know, drunken sailors to hit their goals. and I just need to go back to the core of scrappy people and proving it to the market. So it reeks of competence to me,

but that's only because when I was a journalist, I probably would have been like mismanagement. And then once you see companies doing this kind of stuff and you're part of the planning of it and you're seeing it up close and personal, it's typically incredibly thoughtful in how it's done. There are exceptions like that guy and this crazy trend where they lay people off on mass on a Zoom

and stuff like that. Better.com, right. I mean, I think it's always about, to take note of layoffs like this. I suspect you're 100% right. And the reason we're in a very lucky position to be able to make a somewhat informed guess around that because we have talked to him one on one, two on one. And we came away profoundly impressed with the thoughtfulness and care and intentionality

of the CEO. So it is 100% likely, 99% likely that this is pure competence. And also it's the first. freaking grocery delivery business where there are so many bodies littered that we cannot help but wonder, it's a graveyard. It's a graveyard startups from Webvan

to Cosmo. It's clear consumers really like to get cheap goods quickly. And it's clear that founders keep finding innovative ways to delight them. What's not clear is the margin. And that is always going to be the challenge.

Is making enough money to provide the service. And there might be a moment where there's diminishing returns. I suspect, like, if you need emergency deodorant or soap or a six-pack, like, does 15 minutes or 45 minutes actually make a difference? Does $5 for delivery or $12 for delivery, if you're living in a major city in a $3,000 a month apartment, does it actually make a difference? Probably not.

And so that might, this might be one of the rare cases, Molly, where entrepreneurs have built products that over-service the customer to a level that the customers doesn't need. Yeah. Yeah. Could be. I'm trying to think of when I've ever needed 15-minute delivery. And I think the example I gave once was tampons.

And one time I had postmates bring me a plunger. And when you need a plunger, you... Yes. You get a plumbing problem. The plumber cannot come fast enough. Right. And you got a little kid in the house and you can't leave. But I mean, like, those are vanishingly rare.

For snacks, you're okay. Yeah. I mean, it is the use case for delivery has become, you can tell that we've reached a moment of diminishing returns when people are making the decision on when they get their packages based upon how many packages get sent and consolidating them into one so you don't waste the environment or you don't have to open more than one box, right? Like, we've all made that decision where Amazon tells us three boxes on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or one box on Wednesday.

And you're like, I don't want to open three boxes. I don't want to go downstairs and get the three boxes. Just give it to me all on Wednesday, one box, easy, breezy. Right, you've done that, I'm sure. 100%. And it's almost like a massive experiment. It's like a huge test about what consumers really want. And I suspect that Amazon's got the data that shows that people actually don't need next day delivery as much as they think they do.

Yeah, there are problems that people have that are acute, that are, you know, the, I've got a broken pipe in my house problems. And then there are, yeah, wow, pop tarts are delicious, you know? Like, these are two different classes. I need Kleenex and I'm ordering it from Amazon because I don't have time to go to the store. But do I really need Kleenex tomorrow? Like, no. No.

I mean, the window can be dirty for till Saturday. And when I go to Costco and get it for half the price and get twice as many ounces of. All right. The window. You cleaning your windows with Kleenex? But you said Kleenex? I thought you were talking about Windex. Oh, yeah, yeah, totally.

Yeah, Kleenex, Windex, all this stuff. Right. I mean, if you need Kleenex, you can use toilet paper. I don't know what this stuff is. I don't know what this stuff is. Yeah, how much does it ask me how much a gallon of milk costs? How much a gallon milk costs? I don't know.

15, 20 bucks? You tell me. Gallon of milk, I think it's about $27, I think. Yeah. Well, you will know that I started this live stream being like, how does anyone do it? Can someone come to my house and help me make my life work? Is that a thing?

Can you have that? I need that. Yeah. I mean, get a family assistant, I guess is the title. Is that a title? That's a thing? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's estate manager.

That's when you have three or four homes. They manage making sure all the houses are in good condition. You can outsource that. I actually want to start a startup around that. I had this idea of outsourced estate managers. So imagine like whatever your house costs, you pay one percent of that a year to just have somebody manage everything for you. So when you have to replace filters or,

or find a new gardener or change your Tesla charge or whatever it is that's broken or needs to be maintained, you know, you just outsource it to somebody. So I've been really wanting to work on this. I'm trying to find an estate manager who operated at a high level who would want to be like the president of this organization or the general manager because I'd like to run it as a test.

I think it would be incredible. I think there's like even mid-market homes who would want this, right? Well, I was insane. I don't think it even has to be like a multiple home situation. I mean, in a way, that's what I'm talking about. but just for like life. Yeah, so fractional estate manager is. Strait managers are $150,000.

Or house assistant. It could be, you know what? You could have tears. You could have estate manager. Yeah. And that's your moneymaker. But you could also have fractional home assistant. I mean, literally for 20 years, I've been talking to my friends about like, could three of us families just share a home assistant?

A home assistant. I just didn't know what was called that. And now I know what to do. They used to call it. It was a little sexist, but I think they called it like a Friday girl, was like the old term for it. Really? I just thought maybe it was like called a housekeeper.

It was somebody who would come to your business or a home and do your bookkeeping on Fridays and open your mail. And, you know, just like somebody to help out one day a week. So with my concept for the estate manager would be fractional estate manager. So if you have one house and it's 3,000 square feet and it has like one kitchen and, you know, three bathrooms, that's like one level of estate management. Now you've got a house that's 10,000 square feet with, you know, two or three kitchen-like areas, wet bars, and all this stuff.

And then you have a second home. Now, and you have an office or whatever, now you're starting to need somebody to just rotate between them. And there's always going to be maintenance going on. So if you could fractionalize that, but have one phone number to call, that would be incredible. Because almost universally, everybody in your neighborhood is trying to figure out who is the best pool person, the best gardening person, the best plumber. Right. And if you represented, say, 25 homes in Oakland and 25 firms in Berkeley and 25 in the wider Bay area, they get 75 homes in an area, you know the four best plumbers, you know

their pricing, and you're not redoing that because you're like, okay, Molly needs to have her, you know, sink redone. Jason's already had his sink redone. They both use this polyform, so we got the person who does that. We know the replacement cost, and so they can't screw you on the bill, right? Right. And so it's sort of like it's the level in between Thumbtack and you. Yes. Sort of. Thumbtack is amazing.

Thumbtack is aggregating all the providers. Yeah. Thumbtack will get you four great people. But then you need the person who's like, I went and found them and booked them and showed them. And was there when they showed up. And check the work. Check the bill. Yeah.

Paid it for you. And I've worked with them on seven other projects. Like getting your Wi-Fi set up properly in your home is like, you know, it's a day's job. but not for the person who's done it a hundred times. It's a two-hour job for them. Totally. Yeah. So anyway, that's my idea.

If anybody wants, let's leave this in the show. If anybody wants to work on the estate manager startup I want to incubate, I'm just looking for somebody in the Bay Area who's done estate management already and wants to work in a startup where we would serve us like maybe 10 properties in the beta. Be the idea. If you're a startup developing new software or investing in R&D, you may be owed up to to $250,000 in cash back from the government. But the R&D tax credit program is very complicated.

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The deadline to claim is approaching. Fast. So contact BOST today. The first 50 customer signups will get 10% off their first year of file. Just mentioned the promo code Twist at boast.a.i slash twist. That's B-O-A-S-T-A-I slash twist. All right. Love this. So let's talk about Fast. We talked about this earlier in the week. This is, of course, the one-click checkout startup. We covered it a number of times. And Dom from the company has been on the podcast before as well. They're now, according to reports, considering layoffs and trying to find a buyer after failing to raise at two different valuations over the past few months. This is yet another story, Molly, of the market changes quickly, and founders must react to it. And this is a great bookend to the previous story with GoPuff. Maybe GoPuff is acting proactively and maybe Fast is acting reactively, retrospectively. So why don't you choose this other?

I mean, yes. So I'll cue us up here before we dive into analyzing Fast, of course, is part of the reason we're also fascinated by the story is that Fast is the company that sprung up as a direct competitor to Bolt. And according to Ryan Breslow's initial attention getting tweet storm was created potentially a little bit by Stripe and the YC Mafia, this is his accusation, to compete directly with Bolt. Now, either way, one-click checkout software for online merchants is not a terrible idea. Seems like a good moneymaker. It also seems like fast grew incredibly quickly, raised about $120 million from investors, including Stripe and Index Ventures, but its main product generated just $600,000 last year according to the information. By the way, shout out to Malik Morris at the information, who is a fast scoop machine.

just as like producing story after story after story about this company. But, you know, this is one of those, this is a very much like a feels like a FOMOVC story where people were just, they were seeing maybe Bolt success, they were seeing Stripe print money. Stripe itself was like, cool, how can we extend, you know, this success into other areas of payments in FinTech? Payments are a big deal. Where do we think this all went wrong? So, you know, if it was in fact like a revenge startup, as Ryan Brayn,

Rest Lowe is kind of framing it as, that's never a great way to build a company, which is as a reaction to another company, or it's rarely a good way to build a company, I should say. Sometimes, you know, Steve Jobs will make IBM into the enemy, and, but the truth is, Steve Jobs and Waz were just very focused on early computer users and delighting them. They weren't really trying to kill IBM. That became like a meme and a bit of a marketing. Well, every company needs competition, right? Competition makes you want to fight harder. Of course, right.

So it's great motivation to have. It's good to talk about who's your competition. It's maybe not good to spin up a company whole cloth. Yes. To come after your competition. Right. Now, if you say there must be a better way and I have a better idea instead of renting time, you know, off of some giant mainframe computer, I want to put a computer on your desk

and it won't be as powerful as that one, but it'll be on your desk and it's yours. You know, okay, great. Let's start that competition, that paradigm shift. but here, it could just be poor execution, it could be a wildly competitive space,

and it could also be overfunding, and the overfunding then makes this company look like a failure. Now, if this company had raised $10 million, and it had $600 million in revenue,

and it had 60 employees, we would be looking at something, six, I'm sorry, we had $600,000 in revenue with 60 employees, and you're making $10,000 per employee, and they had put $10 million to work, they would be trading at, you know, and it was a $50 million company,

okay, they would be trading at a more reasonable valuation, 50 times, 100 times their revenue, and their revenue employee wouldn't feel as modest, and they'd feel more efficient. So this is where overfunding, again, this is going to be a continuing theme in 2022, what looked reasonable last year looks completely insane this year. So by this year standards, well,

why did this company need so much money? Why do they have 500 employees? Is that actually a distraction? Because if they've only got, you know, 600,000 in revenue in $30 million, they don't need that many employees. And obviously, it's not an efficient way to deploy capital. Yeah.

If Stripe was worth $100 billion or $200 billion in the private market, for them to make $100 million bet is, you know, like literally, you know, whatever it is, a fraction of 1% of the value of their company. and so it's worth taking a shot. So weird behaviors happen in hot markets and then eventually reality sets in. You cannot defy gravity.

You can put on a cape, you can pretend you're flying, but gravity is gravity, you know, and now we're seeing what happens when you don't hit your numbers and what are they going to do here? Lay off 400 people, go to 100 people and have the money last longer.

I don't know. Apparently, last week. the company's CEO told potential investors that fast could slash its 500 person staff by 50% to reduce cash. Oh, okay. So yeah. So I just ended. So specifically exactly what you said.

Yes. It's in fact what they're talking about doing. Again, back to the mature thing to do, the market changes be mature. You got to. You have to do it. And react to the reality here. So, you know, it's very easy for people to dunk on Dom, who I had on the program. And people were asking me today, like, what did you think?

of him now and reflection. I thought the same thing and I said it then. He was too much sales pitching, too much marketing, you know, a lot of sizzle, not a lot of steak, a lot of hat, not a, what do they say? Like, with cowboys. All hat, no cattle. Yeah, all hat, no cattle. Now, that's not a dig to him. He's early in his career. And now this is his crucible moment. So if I'm Dom or I'm Dom's mentor, I'm on his board, I'm sitting him down and saying, listen, everybody thinks you're a d-a-a-every think you don't know what you're doing. Is that who you are or not? Because now is your chance. This is your crucible moment, as Ruliffe would say, at Sequoia.

Okay, so are you going to be mature? Are you going to make the layoffs? Are you going to double revenue with half as many people? Because that's what the world needs to see. They need to see you triple revenue year over year, double revenue, quadruple revenue, year over year with half as many people. And they need you to stop with the tweet storms and, you know, giving yourselves high fives and, you know, all this nonsense.

You got no business giving out. startup advice. And so there's too much start. When I started, there wasn't enough startup advice. Nobody knew Molly how to read a term sheet. Nobody knew who the angels were in the world. It was all very clandestine. And if you asked another founder, hey, can I, can I see your term sheet that the VC gave? No, no, I'm not allowed to show it to you. Well, can you introduce me to somebody there? I don't know. Let me ask. Like, it was all very, very clandestine and an insider kind of approach. Now, all the information's out there. Well, one of the problems with all the information out there is, you know, people like Dom might be giving startup advice.

and people might be taking it because he raised $100 million and he might not have any idea what he's doing. Yeah. Right. And so be careful who you take your startup advice from. You might be taking startup advice from somebody who is literally racing off a cliff and doesn't know it. And then you're like, I'm going to follow that guy.

And all of a sudden, you've raced off the cliff, Delman-Louis style. And you were chasing them to a destination that does not actually exist. It's really interesting. It's sort of like how it's like Instagram or like someone else's happy marriage. Like, you see a startup that's raised $120 million and they're in hypergrowth and you're like, oh, my God. Like, their house looks so great and their marriage seems so awesome. You have no idea what's happening inside. Exactly.

No idea. Meanwhile, like, yeah, you wake up one day and like the story comes out of like how horrible their marriage was and how to functionally and say. And you're like, oh, my God. You're like, oh, God, everything seems so great because of your $120 million. I mean, fake it too. You make it. We talked about that on yesterday's show on Thursday with this week in streaming and Lon. You know, you are perpetually trying to sell a vision to raise money.

And that's great until your life becomes more selling the vision than, you know, creating the reality. And your skill set, I see this with a lot of founders, they become so skillful at telling the story, so skillful at raising the next round, that they start to do what is most enjoyable. And what's most enjoyable is to raise that next round at a higher evaluation because it makes you feel good. It's like, oh, look at the scoreboard. But the real scoreboard is your customers. And are they renewing or are they churning? And are you delighting them or not? And the scoreboard is, do you have great employees who come to work every day and crush it or not?

And that's basically what it comes down to here is we've lived in a crazy, you know, 24-hour rave known as, you know, the, the boom, and now the lights came on. And the music stopped. And yeah, some people are still dancing. My boyfriend is fond of saying when the tide goes out, you find out who's not wearing pants. Exactly. So pick your analogy. This will not be the last time we have a story like this on this week in startups.

I would imagine over the next couple of years. And what's going to be so interesting is just to your exact point, Jason, like to see who rises to this moment, to see what great leaders are going to be made right now. Do it. Show what you're made of. Or quit. That's what's going to happen. You're going to see a bunch of founders where like, this isn't worth it.

I'm going to quit. And then you're going to see other founders just buck up, buck up and get the job done. You know, Frank Slutman is a wartime CEO. You know what they said? Frank Slupp was like talking to somebody. I heard this conversation. And he's like, you know, you're a great wartime CEO.

He says, business is always war. And business is always war. So, Dom should have been acting as if this was a war the whole time. And, you know, now he's going to really, he's behind the eight ball. So step it up. Yep. Step it up. He should get out there on sales calls himself.

He should be talking to his customers, you know, even if it's a small number of customers, he should be talking to him saying, how can I delight you more? And he should just get everybody focused on the customers. Full stop. Efficiency is one of the main components in startup success. Everybody knows this. You've got to be efficient. That's what Coda is all about.

Coda is the all-in-one doc for teams. Your text and tables live together in the same document, and this helps any team collaborate more efficiently, especially remote ones. They've got thousands of templates to work with at Coda, or you can repurpose templates published by some of the best innovators out there for yourself. Coda works out of the box, and it's completely customizable, so you can create a Wiki or a Knowledge Hub for your team,

you can onboard new hires quickly, and adapt fast to any major or minor changes in your business. Here's how we use it at This Weekend Startus. My Guy Presh made an upvoting system on Coda so that you, the audience of This Weekend Startups, can ask questions and request topics to be covered on this very program. You can see this at This Weekend Startups.com slash questions. And if you go there, you can submit a question or a topic. And our producers might include you in the show. You can vote things up and down.

How amazing and awesome is that. Coda has an amazing program for startups I want to tell you about. They're here to optimize and support your docs. And they're going to give you a thousand dollar credit right now. Yeah, you heard that right. $1,000 credit at coda.io slash twist, Codda. dot I-o-slash T-W-I-S-T. All right.

Let's tweeting. Less tweeting. Let's tweeting more operating. Speaking of operators, next up, we have an incredible conversation with long-time political strategist and investor, Bradley Tusk of Tusk Ventures, author of The Fixer, about, I mean, all things at the intersection of regulation and startups. It's so freaking interesting. We talk about Uber's taxi strategy

in New York City, sports betting, regulation writ large as a market maker and breaker. And ketamine. And ketamine. I mean, it literally has everything. If you want to take a deep dive into ketamine and other, the regulation of psychedelics, we touch on that as well.

And Bradley had some firsthand experiences that he actually shared with us. So stick with us. It's a great idea. You got it all. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of this week in startups. Bradley Tusk is with us.

Good to see you, Bradley. He was on episode 1327 back in November of 2021. And Bradley's a bit of a fixer. He knows how to work in regulated environments, and he's also an investor, was early in the Uber experience. And I guess I have to start with two questions, Bradley. One, are you watching the show and any quick thoughts there?

And then number two, what do you think of the taxis quite ironically or paradoxically, including themselves in Uber after we're watching a TV show from 11 years ago, basically showing us the taxi lobby, doing everything they can to kill Lift and Uber. Yeah, so a few things. One is I'm not watching it

because my view is it's just going to make me really upset, so it didn't seem worthwhile. You know, I continue to be friends with Travis, some investor in Cloud Kitchen and work on it. So didn't really feel like watching him just be totally smeared. And then in terms of that, look, it's interesting because you could look at it as sort of a failure on both sides, right? Which is for taxi, yes, you know, wildly hypocritical to be calling us every possible name and accusing us of everything, you know, imaginable for so many years and then being on the platform. On the flip side for Uber, though, you know, while it was a smart move and the stock went up as a result of it,

It's also sort of an acknowledgement that the original Uber vision didn't quite work, or at least wasn't quite executed properly, right? In the sense of if Uber was able to deliver the value proposition that initially envisioned, it wouldn't need to put taxi on there, right? Now effectively by equating everything, what it says in a way is, yeah, we may not be that better after all. So, and look, I have a probably somewhat controversial view, which was when the board replaced Travis, they should have replaced them with someone equally aggressive and visionary. And I think by putting Dara in there, from my perspective,

good manager seems like a nice man. But the underlying vision that would have made Uber a multi-hundred billion dollar company took someone different to pursue. He hasn't pursued that. And I think as a result, you know, it's kind of middling. That's so interesting. We've been having sort of an ongoing conversation with about founder control. Partly because we're watching all these shows and we're all sort of reliving that, but also we see Mark Zuckerberg with super voting shares, you know, taking down America, left and right.

And there is this, we've had this question about where the pendulum is going to swing next in terms of founders. Like, is it going to be another situation like after the dot com crash where you had to put a grownup in charge of every company? And it sounds like you're saying, you can do that, but what you might do is drain the life out of a really vibrant unicorn? Yeah, it cut. Exactly. So on one hand, look, I don't know what you guys are seeing, but even the last eight weeks, I think not only are valuation starting to drop a little bit, but some of the ability for founders to sort of set these terms that felt a little crazy to us even four or five months ago. They're not quite as bold to ask for those things right now. So I think on one hand, they're going to have a little less control based on some recent changes in the market. On the other hand, yeah, I mean, that's, look, I know that a lot of times the thesis is put the kind of crazy visionary in at first and then replace them with a grown-up once the company goes public or you're trying to get to the next stage. Oftentimes that can work, but fundamentally, if the company's whole success is dependent upon the original vision being executed, you have to either

leave the founder in there or replace them with someone who also has the same skill set and interest in doing that, right? When you replace them with the opposite personality and that they're basically told not to do anything that the old guy did, then. And by definition, yeah, you're shutting down the potential that you invested. You know, I looked at the taxi thing slightly differently, which was if you're going to want to make peace with these cities, allowing one app to have everything in it and kind of not threatening their ultimate demise to ride sharing, it was kind of like an olive branch of, hey, sure, we'll send some of our traffic. your way, we'll make a little bit on it. Now you've got this more complete app, because Travis did always think about maybe buses would be in there

or some public transportation would be in there. So I looked at it slightly differently, which was, hey, if we're collecting this data, sharing it with New York, you know, the administrations would understand it more. And then, well, if there were people who didn't know about Uber by now or, you know, we're fans of taxes for whatever reason, well, now they have Uber and they could hit Uber eats. And hey, listen, I would rather Argyi be in there, of course.

But they have gotten to this point where actually they're going to be throwing off cash flow. So at least the company, I think, is the fault a lot. I was just going to say that. I'm like, wow. So it's kind of hard to. No more losing a billion dollars a quarter because I kind of liked that. What was great about it was, you know, if you look at the disparity in the number of cities, Uber's in versus Lyft, even to this day, it's just extraordinary. the footprints of the businesses or whatever it is.

Totally. And by the way, I have, let me quickly pitch it because I think it's really interesting, a way that Uber could actually literally drive Lyft out of business completely. And it's a little counterintuitive. But if Uber actually changed their position on the work classification issue and said, we're going to make all of our drivers employees, then by definition, those drivers can't drive for Uber and for Lyft like they can with their independent contractors.

When that happens, because of the point you just made, Jason, Drivers are going to pick wherever the bigger market share is. That's going to be Uber basically absolutely everywhere. Once they start shifting over, look, the network effect can run in either direction, right? So it could work well, but could also really fall apart. And as more and more drivers shift over from Lyft to Uber, because that's the better opportunity for them, they no longer have the choice of doing both, then customers say, I'm not waiting 16 minutes for a Lyft, and they download Uber too or switch to the other app.

And eventually over time, I don't see how Lyft stays in business because they don't really have that many other revenue streams. It's fascinating to bring that up because I love this. I said that on CNBC years ago and I almost got left out of the room and I was like, well, wait, all of the things that users keep asking about, which is like, you know, getting cars on the slow days and then is there any standards in the cars? Can the drivers have a standard, you know, uniform code of conduct, cleanliness of car? We couldn't tell them, you know, you couldn't direct the work of an independent contract. Once you start directing their work, when they start, and you needed people early, you needed people to start at 5 a.m. To get commuters and people going to the airport, and that was hard to get drivers on the road at that time. Setting the times, you know, maybe wearing, putting an Uber logo on the side of the car, putting advertising the car.

Once you started dictating how they did work, that is when you triggered the full-time thing. So, yeah, it would be, it started to become shift work, and that would stink for the independent contractors. But I think the other thing that's happened, correct me if I'm wrong, when you look at the independent contractor versus full-time employment, it seems like there's politicians and unions who really want to push people towards full-time shift work. Oh, sure. But the market actually has kind of spoken where people are like, I value my flexibility. I please leave this on-demand economy alone. Yeah. And now that the prices have raised, you know, and there's like all the floors are in with floors, gig work seems.

acceptable to the overwhelming majority of people. Without a floor. The third way, right? That's the idea of the third way. Ultimately, you could take the third way a couple of steps further, right? So by definition, if you look at organized labor, turning the sharing economy workers into full-time employees is their biggest opportunity for organizing in decades, right? The private sector labor unions have never recovered from the kind of demise of auto and everything

else. So for them, this is a huge deal. because once someone becomes a W-2, if that place is represented by a union, they start paying dues, they become members. It really works to the financial advantage of the unions itself. The companies obviously have said, look, we want to be able to both have our own independence and give our drivers independence. And that logic makes sense. But there's really no reason why we have to stick with a system that was created in the 1930s, right? This is when FDR was present. Francis Perkins was a labor secretary. And that third way, you know,

makes eminent sense, right? Where you could, for example, we were at one point work on a couple called Handy. I don't know if you guys know that. I remember. They, what they asked us to do was sort of so crazy in a way because they just said, we would like to give health benefits and other benefits to the people on our platform, but not if it then automatically turns us into a W-2 employer. Can you get his permission to give people benefits?

And amazingly, of course, all the red states were like, yeah, no problem at all. And all the blue states were like, no, which should be the opposite. of what you would think. But the blue states were like, oh, if they can get benefits and maintain their independence, why would they ever want to become a full-time employee? Why would they ever want to pay union dues or anything like that? So ironically, the far left was blocking benefits for working people simply because they were trying to preserve the bigger opportunity for organized labor who were their political

supporter. Right. This is your specific genius, Bradley, which is like you sit at this intersection between startups and policy. And when you and I talked in 2018, you know, one of the things you said is that you had found that startups would take their tech seriously, their fundraising seriously, but they look at government and politics as an afterthought, which then, you know, at the time you said it was a really risky thing to do. I think it's borne out that that was a very risky thing to do. Is there a difference now? I mean, I can't say that. Yeah. It's getting a little better.

I'll give you a few things. One is just by the fact that we're now investing out of our third fund that we've been able to do this just shows that at least, you know, Jordan and I had this thesis of you could try to focus specifically on regulated startups and say, hey, we can solve your political regulatory problems. And that clearly has worked well enough that we've, you know, been able to do three funds worth of deals. But to me, one of the biggest things is when I meet with a founder, which like you guys, I do all every day, I want to see that they know what they don't know, especially when it comes

to government, politics, media, things like that. And I would say the average kind of founder five, six years ago was more on the lines of, oh, I went to Stanford. I was in White Combinator. John Doors on my board and I'm so brilliant that when those regulators see how special I am, they're going to do whatever I want. That particular mentality has changed enough that I don't hear that too much anymore. Once in a while, when I do, I'm like, okay, X, we're out.

We're done with the call. So the arrogance or entitlement? just assumption because we've been given our flowers by Silicon Valley that the government will just bow down to our brilliance. Yeah, that was the initial assumption. And I think that because they've seen both, you know, Uber and other startups. Caribbean becomes the mind, too. Yeah.

And then the big tech companies get kicked out of them in government and the press. That mentality starting to shift, which is unfortunate, but ultimately helpful if you're me and you want to get people to start really taking regulations seriously. Yeah. Do tech workers need to be unionized? What's the argument for and against? Because we hear all these kind of, you know, things tech companies are taking advantage of people.

And then, you know, that's the sort of worst interpretation over here. And they want to just grind people down and they hear on the, and I mean, actually even including it tech workers, like people who work at Google proper, you know, they've been talking about now. I guess the fiber folks got unionized for the first time. And then there's obviously retail workers like Amazon's retail workers. And then the other side, you hear this,

all these unions only care about dues. They're just trying to collect more dues. They don't care about the actual workers. What's the truth in your reality? So the truth is this. And keep in mind, I've dealt with labor for almost my entire career because you can't work in government and not endlessly negotiate with labor in one form or another. Private sector unions serve a very important purpose, right?

When the people who work in a specific sector lack the ability to sort of advocate for themselves and they are more powerful doing it collectively, then it absolutely makes sense to have private sector unions. So think about like coal miners, right? Like, of course, there should be someone looking out for them to make sure that they get better treatment than they get right now. But if you were in a private sector company, whether it's a sharing economy company or Google or whatever else, the conclusion you have to reach is, I will make more money and have a better

life if I'm in this union than if I'm not. And I remember, so, you know, I was my Bloomberg campaign manager, and we always had this weird thing where we were seeking the support of labor like every single candidate does. And they would say sometimes, well, it was Bloomberg LP unionize. And the answer is no, but the reason no is every time that the union would try to organize, the workers there are like, why? We make really good money. We have amazing benefits. We get all these snacks. Why do I need to pay you dues?

I'm happy the way I am. So it really comes down to if you truly feel like, where you're working that you're being taken advantage of, and that could change if there were collective bargaining power, then yeah, a union makes total sense. But I think in a lot of environments, you know, there's become this ideological assumption that if you're young and progressive, it feels like ideological, not practical.

You have to be pro-labor. But actually, in the case of something like Google, you probably just can have less take home pay if you do that. Well, I mean, the example of, I don't drop it to you, Molly, after this, but the example of the media companies unionizing. That's exactly what I was going to say. Oh, is that what you were to go to? We both found that perplexing because what I heard back channel from somebody got unionized,

I was like, oh, wow, that must have been interesting. He's like, oh, J-Cal, greatest thing ever. And I was like, explain. He's like, well, now when like reporters come to me and they want to raise, I'm just like, I'm sorry, here's a schedule. Like, you're a level 2.5 and you'd have to get to 3.1 for me to give you $6,000 more a year, 500 a month. Whereas previously, somebody came in and be like, listen, I dropped two scoops.

I'm Tella Lorenz. I want to raise. I'm on A1 twice. this person's been able on the front page, zero times I deserve to get paid as much as they do. Period. Understory, but you lose that ability.

Yeah. When you join the union. Yeah, it's true. I mean, I think it's become like, what do you say, though,

I mean, I think it's become a marker of which industries are the most at this point, right? Like, because if the idea is, if the idea is that media companies are unionizing in some ways to try to counter bad management, like there's this sort of question between,

I think, management and regulation. The reality of the business? Well, in the reality of business, exactly. Like, most likely unionizing isn't going to fix bad management, but it seems like increasingly, and I don't mean to derail us, but it seems like increasingly what it can be is a sign of bad management. When you see these outfits organizing, it's because the maybe the entire business model is functional, I don't know. For sure, but the correlation between a company being unionized and that having resulting in better management, you don't see much of that either, right?

It seems to me that in the media. industry. Look, I get it, which is that if you're a reporter anywhere about Fox News and a few other outlets, you know, the thing you're most afraid of is being thrown out of the, you know, the World Mafia or whatever it is. So, therefore, you have to love unions and want to be unionized. But what's interesting is the only media outlets that are really making money are the ones that have flipped the script completely, whether it's on the left or the right, like Fox News or the New York Times, right, where they say, okay, you know what, we're not even to pretend to be objective. We're not even to pretend to be balanced. We are going to take the people

who watch us or read us and make them feel better about themselves and better about their lives by validating their views and invalidating everyone else's. And, look, it's horrible for democracy. It's incredibly polarizing. But it's very lucrative. New York Times is doing better than ever. Fox News does better than anyone else in media by far. So that's actually the model by which media companies can make more money and then theory unionized reporters can make more money. It's incredibly destructive for democracy. It's sad that the New York Times is now such a sort of poor institution. But nonetheless, that's where it's gone.

All right. I think there's two ways we can go here. We could go psychedelics or we can go crypto or we can go gambling. Oh, my gosh. Do you want to take some trumes, place some bets in Bitcoin? That's what we could do right now. I've heard anybody's up for it. Yeah.

You ping Bradley. Did you get my email from two days ago? I did. I did. Yes. I was on the road. But I'll ping you off line. Gambling is my,

that's my wheelhouse. I'm into all these things. Let's start with gambling. Well, I mean, I think to set the stage, we did see the Supreme Court took some action on states being able to decide if they have gambling online or not. Preet Pahara had famously banned online poker. It was a lot of gray area there.

So online poker. and things are coming back, but it's state by state. So what's, catch us up on when that, when that, uh, judgment happened and then how quickly each state fell and what that process was like, because I was getting all kinds of pitches like, hey, this thing happened in the Supreme Court, and here we are, and then it wasn't actually ready to go yet. So where is, what's the state of the union? So PASPA was the name of the law that was overturned by the Supreme Court. It effectively prevented states from making their own decisions around gaming. state of New Jersey sued, and ultimately after going through the entire process, they won.

So what it did was it certainly created the opportunity for every state to then make their own rules and set their own regulatory structure around gaming. And it opened the floodgates, but what I think people in the gaming world who kind of didn't know politics that well didn't understand is, yes, more states are going to allow sports betting, eye gaming, e-sports betting, everything else for sure. But this stuff is not going to happen over. right, right? Because number one, politicians sort of, they always think that if they do a pro-gaming vote, it's going to cost them their seat. In reality, nobody knows the individual vote that any politician, especially a state senator or state rep makes. Nobody knows who their state senator is,

but they all have to get over that initial fear. I've dealt with so many times the government. So that's number one. Number two, gaming bills are tough because you have not just a sandal, which a housing investor in or, you know, someone trying to, you know, MGM trying to bring more eye gaming or whatever it is. You have all the existing casinos. You have the race tracks. You might have dog tracks. You might have Highlie, poker rooms, Native American tribe. And they're all weighing in on the process, which means you can still get to the right place. I think something that 29 states have now legalized sports betting, but it's a multi-year process. It's not an overnight process. But the good news is every time that we get one sort of piece of digital done,

I think the other ones move faster. So the first frontier was sports betting, which also, by the way, is probably the worst business within digital gambling. Because ultimately, because it's a really commoditized product, you don't have any control over where and when it happens, and you just can't differentiate yourself. So Fanduel, Draft Kings, MGM, Sears, it's kind of a race to the bottom of who can give customers more incentives and free play because otherwise,

they'd really distinguish themselves. Whereas eye gaming and ultimately e-sports gaming. So you want to bet an NFL game. A lot has to happen. You need two teams, a stadium, referees, uniforms, the amount of friction is significant, right? Two dudes in solar playing Madden and you're just betting if the next play is a runner or a pass, it's infinite, right? So ultimately, both for the sector and for the taxpayers, to me, the real money will come with eye gaming and e-sports gaming.

And we're getting there. So five states allow eye gaming right now. No one's even really thought about e-sports gaming yet because it's so new. but that's going to increase significantly over the next couple of years. In eye gaming, are you allowed to bet on yourself? Or is it people betting on just games they're watching? It could be either one, but right now it's more what you're actually doing on your own. So you're playing poker or blackjack or whatever it is.

But you and I could play some video game for cash versus each other. Is the ultimate concept? Yeah. I mean, that's the ultimate or actually a step further. The ultimate dream, which we are working on, is third-party e-sports betting. So peer-to-peer is good, but again, take some friction. You and I have to say, text and say, hey, do you want to play Fortnite? And then we have to go do it, right?

We know, and keep I have a 13-year-old son, so I'm very familiar with the video game world at the moment. The amount of people just playing something at any given time is massive, right? So any game you could possibly want, if you said, I'm just going to go on Twitch or YouTube or wherever it is and watch people. people play and bet on it, that's the whole league rail. What is this? Oh, go ahead, Molly. I'm sorry, the gambling just got me like 50 questions pumped down. I mean, this is your jam.

You keep going. I'm just sort of stunned by that concept and that opportunity. Like, what would that even look like? Is it, do you have this company? Are you trying to cultivate this company? Yeah, no, we're, we're keeping it right now. Uh-huh. That's what I, that's what I email takes about today.

Yeah, we're doing my, we might wet our beaks a little bit here. Would the gamers get paid? And then I'm even just like, I'm like, wait if my, what if my, if my, my, if my, my 15-year-old son is streaming on YouTube playing a game and other people are betting on him. I find that kind of fundamentally creepy, but also like, is he getting a cut? Yeah, I mean, it depends on how you're doing it. So, again, this is all super new and I'm not sure. I have questions.

How many people even thought through this? But I would say in a tournament setting, absolutely, right? That's where sort of the, I think everyone's interest truly aligned, where the gamers, the fans, everyone. And again, your 15-year-old son is not going to inadvertently be in it because he has to choose ends whether tournament or not. So if he chose to, we proactively chose to do so. So we know for a fact that that system works. I think, Molly, the broader question of like, okay, your son is just playing his friend, you know, in League of Legends, and then I'm sitting there watching them and betting. I mean, they're streaming all the time, right? They all know that they need to be streaming.

And so they're streaming to YouTube and they're streaming to Twitch. I guess it's sort of the filter. I mean, I think what you're saying is who would want to bet on a rando game between two kids that happens to be on Twitch, but a tournament, yes. Yeah, the tournament for sure would. I'm not The answer might be that people would bet on the Rando game. I'm not sure. But I do think one of the things you'd have to count for in the Rando game and someone in the Toby in the chat room just mentioned this also, which is you've got to figure out a regulatory system where your son and his friend aren't saying, okay, let's throw

the game, you know, I'll win and let's bet on me. So you've got to be able to work through that potential problem. So in terms of individual non-tournament, there's going to be. got to be some sort of self-regulating mechanism that I've got ideas about how to do it, but it hasn't emerged yet. All right. Explain to me what's going on with playing live casino games, like table games, online.

People are streaming themselves or capturing video of themselves playing Blackjack with a live dealer, basically over Zoom in some apps. This seems to be like a really compelling kind of thing to be able to just interact with a dealer, take out your phone at a bar and I'm playing blackjack. Yeah, for sure. And by the way, it could be a real-life dealer or it could be an AI dealer. You could even expand the scope more and the better the tech gets, you might not even know the difference.

So, yeah, I think that's a massive opportunity because, again, we talked about the friction in sports betting. There's no friction with this, right? You could be playing blackjack anytime, day or night. And quite frankly, you know, you might say that after a certain number of people, it just doesn't make sense to have that a blackjack table. But there are other games where it could probably be pretty infinite, right? If it's roulette, like, why couldn't 50,000 people all put a bet on the same wheel if they wanted to, right?

You can't do it in physical world, but you could do it in the digital world. So, yeah, that is sort of the next step. You're seeing states start to get there. It is a, you know, it's a process like everything with gaming. But yeah, if you fast forward three, four, five years, I think every state that has gaming, and there are a few like Utah that just are never going to, right? But for every state that has gaming in some form, they're going to allow both eye gaming and e-sports betting.

And then the next really interesting question, to me at least, is when Web 3 is fully here, and whatever that means, and we can spend an hour debating that. But that's next. I think the world of gaming changes even more because let's say like your estate lottery. Now I have two options. I'm in the matter. I can either walk to a bodega and buy a scratch-off ticket and with a quarter scratch something off.

or I could pop on my Oculus or whatever the system is. And in a second, I'm in the coolest casino of Monte Carlo with the most glamorous people possible around me and I'm throwing dice. Who's buying a pick six? Who's buying a scratch-off ticket, right? So a lot of gaming is going to have to evolve. And for that matter, I don't know that anyone's going to those riverboat casinos either. I don't know how many those you guys have been to, but they're usually pretty crappy.

Vegas, Macau, the places that are destinations, I think will be fine because there were main destinations, but I do think that this will... Do you think this is going to induce more gambling by normalizing it? Or do you think what the majority case will be is just moving gambling from the shadows and the gray market, black market economy, and then making a tax if you were to look at it. Yeah, it's a little bit of both, right? Majority of one or the other? I think the majority moving out of the shadows.

That's what I think, too. I think it's 70, 80% just taking stuff that was occurring. back rooms and putting it at friend center. Frankly, it's like only fans or Tumblr getting rid of porn, which, you know, push sex workers back into the dark ages of pimps. Anyway, side note. So, but look, whether it's drugs, gambling, we learn this lesson with alcohol and prohibition already.

There are things that people want to do. You can tell them they can't do it. It doesn't make them not do it. It just creates a black market with crime and violence and everything else. And you'd ultimately rather have whatever the activity is regulated and taxed than just happening totally out there in the wild with no ability to influence it at all. So that's true for gaming. It's eventually going to be true for drugs.

We've seen it with cannabis. We're going to see it next with psychedelics. But yeah, to me, Jason, it's just taking it out of the shadows and bring it into the... But some percentage will be inducing more introducing. I mean, it will. And you can't say it wouldn't. But hold on the flip side, let's say that lotteries don't survive this or Riverboat casinos don't survive this or dog tracks don't survive this.

you know, people are going to fall off on that end. They're going to start up on this end. I think probably the worst societal effect would be younger people who may not have bet before are far more easily brought into the mix like than, you know, I think about my grandparents. It's not going to be zero some. Right. They would buy lottery tickets every day. My grandfather would go to Belmont or Aqueduct, you know, all the time, Yonkers when they were, you know.

OTP was an entire. I would go to, see, you know, because we lived right by them as sheep said bad. You know what OTB is, Molly? What we're talking about? No. So there was something called in New York off-track betting. They basically were storefronts. Oh, yeah, I know what that is.

Yeah, yeah. And so OTB was the brand in New York, and you would go by a storefront, and there'd be 30 people packed into a tiny storefront buying tickets looking at tiny television sets, smoking cigarettes. And there were so many people in that that my dad started opening for lunch because we happened to be four doors down on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn in Bay Ridge. And when he opened for lunch, it was just OTB people. people going and getting a hamburger and then going back and back and forth and they smoke like chimneys.

I mean, our producers are saying in the chat, you know, and they're younger than we are. That they're seeing among their cohorts that this is definitely happening, that they feel like these are, these are like the jewel of gambling, right? That it's targeting younger people. It's bringing more of them in. Like, I think there's no question that it is. And so I would say that when you consider when you consider expanding these, I mean, you wouldn't, let's be honest, like you wouldn't be investing if you didn't think it was going to grow.

rather than be a zero sum. So then the question is, what will the eventual backlash be because there always is one, you know? Yeah. Look, I think ultimately the e-sports one may have a greater backlash because parents will say, oh, I know my kid's playing. I don't want them gambling. And if you're a politician, it's a good Sunday press conference to have, right? Got it.

I'm going to protect the children. Yeah. Yeah. However, I also think that the opportunity is so significant. government always needs more money. And yes, there will have to be a lot around age verification, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with people with the age of 18 betting on video games or blackjack or poker or sports or anything else. And so the on the industry to really get age verification rights. Where I think the Jewel comparison sort of both works and doesn't work is if the industry does what Jewel did.

And they basically build a product that is completely targeted to people under the age of age of age, teen and then they just lie about it. You ultimately don't survive, right? And Jewel has taken a lot of hits for it, deservedly so. I mean, when they came to us about an investment, we said, look, we're not interested, you know, I have two teenage kids. Like, I'm not interested in making it easier for them to get flavored, you know, veins. A collat of it.

Right. But if you told me, all you want to do is sell to adults and how do we change our business model to do that, like, okay, that's an interesting conversation to have. So I think where the gaming companies are going to have to be smart and step up is, yes, Is there a world of business pride from 14 to 18 that they could have if they didn't follow the rules? Absolutely. But if they pursue that, I think they'd run the risk of being shut down completely. I take such an opposite stance on this, which is the sooner your kids can learn the math and the control and the executive functioning of gambling, the more prepared they're going to be for real life because real life is just one giant set of decisions.

And if presented as here's the decision-making framework in a game of skill, chess, chess, sports, you know, poker, forget about just randomly betting on sports. But it would be important to understand how those odds are laid. So actually teaching them how to be a bookmaker and how to lay the odds and the mechanics of it, the more prepared they're going to be for the real world. So this putting kids in a box and like, you know, we used to buy, we used to play the sheets. You know, you get the Sunday sheet and it would just be, you know, you pick, which, and

we pay a dollar to three dollars when we're kids in high school, we were doing it. And it was like kind of controlled. So I like the idea of a controlled one. If they built into Fortnite, think about this way, Molly, if you're a teenager decided, like, hey, mom, can I be in this tournament? It's a 10 week tournament. It's $10 a week. We play, and this is the payout schedule for the winners. It's $100 for a 10 week tournament.

Can I play in it? I mean, he's already trying to do that like he qualified for some CSGO tournament and there's a, you know, monetary. God help me. Like buy in. I mean, you know, look, I said on the show recently that he has a fidelity account where he can do fractional investment. and frankly, it's not that far off. But I'm just, all I'm pointing out, and I'm not even trying to make the moral argument

one way or the other, it's just sort of like, you as a person who sits in between startups and regulators know that there will humans love a backlash and love to overcorrect. And there will be a company that markets to kids and it will be a problem for the whole industry at some point. Yeah, or you have to anticipate this stuff and figure out how are you going to create a narrative

and position yourself before the bad thing happens or that when it does, it doesn't splash back on you. Yeah. Yeah. As a startup, of course. Yeah. Well, I was going to say this gets the whole idea, another conversation we've been having

on an ongoing basis about regulatory certainty. And like, you know, we're talking about gambling now and we're in a state where 29 states of legalized gambling, but not every state has. And the rules are really confusing. That's sort of the same universe that's happening in crypto, which is that you, you know, the SEC has yet to sort of get it together. And even FDIC has yet to get it together in terms of like, What's a security? What isn't a security? What's allowed? What isn't? Like, what's your thinking on not only navigating regulation, but ways in which regulation needs to get it together to be a market maker or at least to set the rules that could help companies thrive?

Yeah. I split it into two buckets, right? So the first bucket, kind of Uber or Airbnb are kind of really good or Fandul. Good examples where, you know, take Uber and Jason knows he was there. Like, Travis, as brilliant as he is, didn't invent the idea of paying people to take you from point A to point B. That's been around for thousands of years. He figured out a much better way to do it, but it was still a tweak on an existing system, whether it's hotels or taxis or casinos or whatever it is. In those situations, the regulatory fight is really a market share fight between the incumbents and the startups, and the incumbents are trying to use regulation to prevent the startups for gaining traction. But then the other half, and this is the stuff that to me is more interesting, actually,

are the white spaces. So that could be crypto or AI or machine learning or drones or autonomous cars or however many other things. Or climate. Yeah. There is no incumbent that you're fighting against. And there is no existing regulatory framework and you're creating it. So like I'll give you a good example. We're investors called dibs.

It's a fractionalized sports car trading company, you know, on blockchain. We had one of the most interesting discussions in my career about a year ago where it was we know we're going to be regular. eventually because Dibs takes physical custody of the card, right? So eventually they'll figure this out and regulate us. We could wait and just kind of play out the string and see what happens. Or we could pick our regulator, right? So we decided after a whole process, we were the state of Wyoming, the state of New York, and the SEC, we went after a whole analytical process, landed for a bunch of reasons on the

state of New York. And we went to them. They were kind of shocked. We're like, we'd like to be regulated, which is not usually the call if they get every day. But fundamentally, if you're in these white spaces, you know, you got to figure out they're going to be regulated eventually. So what do you want? What would benefit your company the most? How do you build a regulatory mode to box out the competition?

And so I think the way that you think about white spaces has to be really different than the way that you think about existing industries that are really just tweaks. So for fractional ownership, like Masterpiece, that IO does this, people are doing it in real estate. You're saying, hey, it feels like it, well, I guess some people could argue it's a security. Other people could argue it's like an LLC sharing ownership, like an SPV like we do for investing. And so just proactively pick which modality you want to embrace and embrace it fully and then just build the infrastructure of the company and the cost structure on the company as capable of doing that, a place where that hasn't happened, NFTs. And we just did an interview with Fish Fry.

I guess Gary V's NFT. They're making a restaurant. They raised over $14 million and NFTs to build a rest. restaurant. And then I was like, well, how long does a restaurant exist for? And they're like, yeah, it's going to be a great restaurant. And I'm like, and then what happens if Molly was like, well, what happens if you kick somebody out because, you know, they're, they go full Will Smith at the place. Uh, you know, like, what do we do here, you know? Uh, and he's like, yeah, we'll figure that out. So it's like, oh, okay, so more things than not, they're kind of on the fly figuring

this out. What do you think of this, you know, forget about flyfish club as a concept, but just NFTs as a concept. Yeah. I have a maybe, maybe, unpopular view on NFTs, which is, and by the way, you know, we're in dibs, like we're certainly involved in the space. However, it seems to me people who really care about crypto and like crypto don't want to convert their money to Fiat. They want to spend it in the form of crypto. And right now, there's only two things you can do with it. You can go on tour and buy like a grenade launcher or MDMA or whatever it is, or you can buy NFTs, right? Those are the two things that you can clearly buy right now with cryptocurrency. As a result, you have this

boom with people who have crypto, $2 trillion registry right now, and they've nothing to spend the money on. So to me, NFTs have this way artificially high valuation or just value on each thing simply because supply and demand. But when the Metaverse comes, that's when, in my view, crypto shifts from being an asset class to a currency. Once that happens and you can buy basically anything with Ethereum or Solana or whatever it is, I don't know that NFTs really sort of holds up after that. Now, that might not be for another five, seven years, but I think the reason why NFTs are doing well is simply because they're the only game. Interesting. And then we're sort of like saying paper here. Like, yeah, you can make a lot of different things with a piece

of paper. You put a contract on it. You can write a poem. You can make toilet paper. It's not like it's, it's really open for interpretation. People are using them as membership clubs in some cases. Then some cases are creating Dow's. It's a fancy term for something we've had for a long time. in the UK and here in the United States, like an LLC, a limited liability corporation. And so whenever anybody pitches me on it, I'm like, well, that's illegal according to the law here in the United States.

And then they say, well, you just create a Dow, raise all this money, and then you distribute it, and then people vote. I'm like, what's the corporate entity? And they're like, what do you mean? I'm like, when you take money, don't you have to make a corporate entity? Like, no, you just put it in a wallet.

And so walk me through like the sort of blissful naivete of like the Dow crowd that they can just collect money from people and deploy it and not even know who they are. Right. I think when they do this stuff, are they getting, yeah. Explain what's going on here why one group of people thinks they can do anything. And another group of people is like, I don't want to go to jail. Right.

And so there's a few things. So one is, look, crypto by definition is a sovereignless currency, right? It's not supposed to apply to the rules of central banks in any given country. And if you take a step even further back, to me, and I find this actually kind of Beautiful. What crypto really is, is it's the manifestation of the loss of trust in our institutions, right? So since the Vietnam War, which take this country, trust in government, Wall Street, media, the church, higher ed has plummeted. And then that trust has to go somewhere, right? It creates a vacuum. And I think one of the geniuses of crypto is it gave some people a place to say,

okay, you know what, I don't trust the Fed Reserve. I don't trust Washington, D.C. I would rather throw my lot in with similarly minded people, even if I've always... never know who they are, but I still think that's a better community for me than participating in this corrupt system, right? So if you truly believe that, then the kind of Dow example that you gave, Jason, makes sense because it's like, oh, we're not part of any sovereign rules and governance structure. We're existing kind of on the outside of it all together. And it's a nice theory, but the problem is whether it's, you know, Dow's doing things that aren't legal or generally speaking, crypto-facing SEC regulation, the reality of government and politics are still going to

come into play with all of this. And I think the greatest existential threat to cryptocurrency is not technology. It's not even belief in the system anymore. It's regulation, right? Because Biden issued an executive order a couple of weeks ago around crypto. And I think the industry misinterpreted it. People were pretty excited about it and happy about it and everything rose that day. What did you see? I see it as more of a problem. I felt like there was some stuff in there that was fine we all agree with. Yes, we should figure out ways to help the unbanked. Yes, we want crypto jobs in this country.

You know, yes, we should have consumer protection. Kumbaya stuff. Yeah, nobody sees that. But what it really did, to me, was it said the SEC and the U.S. government have the power to do whatever they want to regulate crypto. It's something like if they see anything as a threat to our financial system or economy or anything else they could do whatever they want, to me, the EEO was really an affirmation of, okay, Gary Gensler, go for it. do whatever you want. If the regulators are super pro-crypto, that's a different story. But it not only didn't tie their hands, it affirmed their power and their authority.

And so it seems to me that until the crypto world gets into the game and becomes political, they're going to really be at the mercy of regulators and a lot of risk. And fundamentally, the only thing that politicians care about in my experience, and keep on, I've worked in city government, state government, federal government, executive, branch, legislative, ran, drunk campaigns. I've really seen this from pretty much every conceivable angle is they just want to stay in office, right? All they care about is can they win the next primary? Because the gerrymanaging, the primary is usually all that really matters.

And so what they're really thinking about is, can whatever entity that I'm saying yes or no to impact my next primary? Right now, nobody thinks that crypto can impact their next primary. For as long as that's the case, no one's going to care what they think about regulations or anything else. but if you became pharma, if you became truly political, then if Gary Gansler worked trying to do things he didn't like, and Joe Biden and the team of the White House is like, oh, you know, 2024, this industry is going to really come out against me. Guess what?

Someone from the White House calls Gansler and says, knock it off. But you're never going to have that kind of protection until you start taking politics seriously. Yeah, it's funny because the day that EA came out, we talked about this on the show. Remember, I was like, I don't think it's a coincidence that this is the day that MasterCard and Visa announced their raise merchant fees. They were like, oh, we're good. We're good. Well, I mean, I think people were living

under a delusion that the government didn't have the ability to stop something. And you need only look at what happened with Napster and what happened with Bictorrent and other services. The government can simply use this tool called the law and enforcement. And these two things combined will put you in jail. And sure, you can do illegal things and get away with it for a time. but you know, you can stop things, maybe not on a technological basis. People could still fire up crypto and send it, but you just make it really uncomfortable

if you get caught doing it. And XRP is the perfect example. You have Ripple, which was acting like a security, had a fixed number of tokens, they controlled the supply, people were buying them to speculate, they were manipulating the market in all kinds of ways, according to the SEC complaint.

And now they're embroiled in a case right now that, who knows, it seems like it's a coin toss to me, but have you been following that XRP case? And what do you want to do your thoughts on it? A little bit. Yeah, I don't sort of know which way it's going to go either. Look, I'm rooting for them. One, I like Chris and Brad, the team over there. We've done some work with them. But again, fundamentally, even the courts are not immune to politics, right? They are not immune to public pressure, to the zeitgeist,

everything else. And you have to create an environment that makes the judges think, okay, if I rule in this way, I'm going to be publicly supported by. Because if they think that they're going to get beat up for it, they're still human beings, right? As smart as our judges might be, they still want to be liked like everybody else wants to be liked and nobody likes being criticized. And again, you have to create a climate and a culture that gives them the permission structure to rule in your favor, right? So, for example, the crypto world could be a tremendous grassroots advocacy force in

U.S. politics, right? Because there's so many people do it. And I know that your average sort of, you know, Bitcoin maxis is not probably thinking that much about like who their city council member is or whatever else. But when you can organize people just from their phone, which they're already on 24 hours a day already, and you can start to then use that to impact public opinion, you know, polling everything else. That's what changes politicians. And then ultimately we talked about this on the last podcast, Jason, mobile voting. So I've been funding and running the campaign nationally to make it possible people to vote on their phones over the blockchain. And the reason why is right now we live in a world where every district of gerrymandered,

the only election that really matters are the primaries. Primary turnout is 10 to 20%. They tend to be the most ideological or the special interests. And as a result, nothing gets done. If turnout were 50%, it would change dramatically. So to use a tech example, and if you guys remember when Amazon tried to set up their second headquarters in Queens, in New York, and everyone thought, you know, they were going to get parades and roses, and instead they got run out of town.

The reason they got run out of town was that they misread the podcast. politics completely, which is, yes, their polling was right. The majority of the city wanted it. Even the majority of the district of Long Island City wanted. But that 8% who bothered show up in the state Senate primary, they're as far left as you get. And they hate Amazon. City council members, state, you know, state center, all of those people actually behave very logically, politically, by killing it, which is, these are the people that are vote in my next election. This is how they feel. I'm going to do what they want because I want to keep my job. Every policy output is the result of a political input.

I mean, and this is like this is the whole ball, right? It's like the law and governments can make your market or break your market. And so you better understand how to play that game, aka your entire investment thesis. Let's, I'm certain that we could talk to you the entire day, but I want to turn to the metaverse briefly. You wrote a long piece about regulating the metaverse, sort of trying to create. a framework, right? A place to start from in terms of having the conversation about regulating the metaverse. It's long, but can you sum it up for us? Yeah, so it's 20 pages, it's 6,000 words.

It's a pamphlet. It's a booklet, really. So it's funny how the whole thing came about, which was, so, you know, like you guys, I like thinking about this stuff, right? So it was over Christmas break, we were down in Austin, see my wife's family, and I was like, you know, I don't always participate in every single activity, right? So in one of the non-participatory moments, kind of had me like, okay, you know, the Metaverse, like, all right, if you were the regulator, Bradley, what would you do? So I started making a list, like, this is relevant, that's relevant. And then when the break was over, I came back and said to the team here,

what would you guys do? And I have dozens of people here who were political experts. And so they all gave their opinions. By the time we were done, it was this 6,000-word 20-page memo. But the fundamental point is this. The Metaverse is coming. It's not like, yes, it's conceptual right now, but it's going to be here. And it's going to be everything good about the Internet and everything bad about the Internet times 10.

And so whatever problems you see right now are only going to be magnified and all kinds of new problems or opportunities are going to emerge. You can't think that we don't have today. So like if you look at the EU just put in something called the Digital Markets Act like last week, I think it was, which really started to change some of the rules. around competition and antitrust and really force Google and Amazon and Facebook and others to be more inclusive in the way that they do things. All of the problems we have today. So Section 230 of the Telecommunications Decency Act, which prevents any liability for the platforms for the content posted by the users, which then means Facebook and Twitter only

have the incentive to want things to be toxic because that's what drives eyeballs and that's what drives clips and that drives revenue. If they were legally liable for some of it, that would change. and they would start to actually moderate the content. Privacy. So you're a person to something called GDPR that gives people a lot more control over their data. Data portability, interoperability, especially in the metaverse, can be incredibly important because we're going to recreate your avatar every time you go into a different metaverse.

That would be nuts. Yeah. So your ability to monetize your data, other people's bulletize your data, all of that has to get addressed. And third is antitrust. And we really don't have laws in this country at this point. that envision kind of what these tech platforms would become like and have ways to keep them in line. So, you know, if the FDC has to sue every single time, that's a long process. And Facebook isn't as rich as the U.S. government, but they're not far off, right?

So all of these companies can spend an equal amount of money on lawyers as the Justice Department can. So you've got to change the underlying loss itself. So these are all things that should be happening today anyway. I think once you reach the metaverse, all these problems are significantly magnified. So if you want to protect kids, if you want to try to keep it from just being even more toxic than ever, if you don't want a handful of companies to control everything, which as an early stage investor, I hate because I don't know about you guys, like, I can't invest in anyone that's going to try to compete with Google or Microsoft or Amazon or anything else because right now they will

crush them and the market and the laws allow them to do so, right? So I think if you want more innovation and you want more consumer protection, you need to act on these issues right now anyway. And then when the Metaverse comes, it just magnifies it exponentially. All right. There you have it, Bradley. Almost an hour, Bradley. We'll have you back on in six to 12 months and check it on the regulatory environment. We didn't even get to psychedelics.

But everybody listening will be getting a, if you go under your seat, there's a big bag of psilocybin for you to figure it out. But, I mean, briefly, we're getting pitched on a lot of stuff. And it seems like that's another one where the will of the people is, you know, driving it as we start with cannabis and it seems like there's, you know, so yeah, yes and no. Plant drugs are going to flip next. So I am a big supporter of it.

I actually just went through a whole ketamine therapy process myself. Oh, really? How was it? Really good. I really found it. Lossenges or an IV or what? Lossenges. Mind bloom is a startup that does it.

I know. I've heard about this mind bloom is racing through the. Fantastic experience. However, I have not made any psychedelic investments yet, simply because as much as I liked them and believe, them personally, I've yet to see an actual technology company that can have a tech multiple and scale. What I see are like things that would be really good for society and people, but they're

retail or they're, you know, they're just not, I haven't seen the business yet that as a venture capital as it makes me want to invest in it. But I think you're absolutely right. It's coming. I don't know if it's seven years or 12 years, but in the same way that cannabis is basically legal everywhere, almost everywhere today, second helps be the same thing. And so this mind bloom company, does an online consultation, you're suffering from anxiety, depression, whatever, and not sleeping

at night, you get lozenges that have ketamine and you put them under your tongue, you feel a tingly sensation, and then you feel less depressed, less. You describe the process of getting it and then the process of taking it. So the point of the ketamine is that, and I'm not obviously a scientist or a doctor, but it increases the neuroplasticity of your brain. And what that means is, especially when you're mom, I'm 48, right? So, like, my mind is far more close than when I was young. I, there were things, for example, that, like, in therapy, I understood intellectually, right?

But I just couldn't accept it emotionally, even though I wanted to and it would make my life a lot better if I could. The ketamine, by increasing the neuroplasticity, made me open to these concepts that otherwise I wouldn't be. But I will say, you got to put in work, right? You have to go into it with this. I knew what I wanted to achieve. I was very specific about it going in. Every time I finished it, I kind of wrote down not just what my thoughts were during the academy session itself, but kind of what this all means for my life.

I ended up producing about a 20-page document that I read multiple times a day now is kind of my practice. So I think it can be incredibly helpful, but you have to put a lot of work into it and you have to go in with a very specific goal. If it's just like, hey, I want to do ketamine six times. and have a good time. Like, you can do that, but quite frankly, it's expensive and labor intensive to do it this way.

And probably doesn't make sense. Yeah, it's the, I see a lot of- It's not tripping balls, but I do know a lot of people who have used it in that therapeutic setting and have found it to be like game-changing. They're not giving you the lozenges for Friday and Saturday night. They're taking a lozenges. You're talking to a therapist.

And whatever it is about your childhood, your trauma, your anxiety about the future, whatever, you know, Twitter addiction, I don't know, just comes to mind. You know, you'd be like, I want to talk about my addiction to whatever or the issues I have with a therapist. So it's not, they're not dealing street ketamine, which, by the way, I mean, with this fentanyl being imported from China and how dangerous it is, I think we have to look at the harm being done

with illicit drugs in a different way, because we now tipped over into a super drug. It's like some sort of science fiction where, you know, the highest you could go would be heroin. And, yeah, that would be like rolling the dice, you know, every couple hundred times maybe you OD. And then fentanyl, it's like, yeah, you're going to OD, basically. Yeah, look, it sounds crazy. But as a parent, sometimes I wonder if, you know, if you're, you know, you know, your kids are smoking weed, if you're like, let me just get it for you from the dispensary. Because if you're buying on the black market and the chance it's laced with fentanyl, you know, that's truly dangerous.

Yeah. Yeah. One hand, I don't want to be like the supplier for my kids by any means, but, you know, it is a real world concern that, you know, I worry about all the time. I also, I mean, it's clearly we just want to talk to you all day, but I talked to a startup that's using ibogaine. There's a drug called ibigain that it can evidently be used for to end addiction, speaking of which, right?

Like, just basically interrupt the receptors in your brain that make you addicted to opioids. And it's this company where they have to set up clinics in Mexico and South America because the drug itself is not federally legal here, but they can offer, you know, they're based here and they offer all the therapeutic services around it, but then you have to go to another country to get this treatment. And it's just like, catch up, catch up. Yeah, it's, I think it's kind of like Ayahuasca or something. It's a disassociative so you can kind of lose your ego and then accept things maybe within more open, like you're saying, more open mind. But neurology, right? It's not woo-woo. It's like the brain is part of the body, interrupt the receptors, like,

change the grooves. Like, it's pretty, it's pretty fascinating. I think that's what they're figuring out. And when you see psychiatrists and therapists who have had, you know, two modalities basically, formalogical therapy, pharmacological therapy, now they see this and it's like, wait a second, rewrite the operating system, refrag the hard drive, reformat everything and then put the data back on nice and clean. Yeah, maybe that's worth checking out. Now, of course, these things do come with a lot of risks. So, yeah, yeah, you've got to really do you're if you're going down this rabbit hole, so to speak, you really want to give it a lot of thought, talk to a lot of different providers.

Yeah, just right, to reinforce that, I didn't do the ketamine thing until I talked to my doctor and had a very thorough conversation about it. When she said, yeah, I'm comfortable with this, then I said, okay, I'm going to go ahead. Totally. Being studied right now at Stanford, my friend's wife is a psychiatrist there, and they're literally studying it, and she told me nothing short of a miracle. Like, people who had severe, there's another way to do it, not the loss, and just but like an IV drip of ketamine that is also supervised.

And they say they give this to people who are, or they're studying giving this to people who have like depression that is absolutely prior to this been, you know, a death sentence of depression. You're not getting out of this to a number of people are getting out of it. And so these poor people who are addictive to fentanyl, the irony may be they're buying fentanyl at Turk Street, but they need to go to Berkeley and trip out and reset their brains. and get off of the opioid addiction,

which is just pernicious and terrible. All right, man, listen. All right. Thanks for having me, guys. Thanks for coming again, Bradley. Appreciate it. We'll talk to you soon, cheers. I'll follow up with you on email.

Sounds good. See you guys. Bye-bye. Take care. All right, we've given you news. We've given you an incredible interview with Bradley Tusk. And now we have one. There's more.

There's more. Thick Boy Friday. I saw somebody tweeting about how they watched every OK boomer segment, which I love to see. So producer Rachel is back with another OK boomer segment. This time it's Akash Raju, at the co-founder of Glimps. And Glimps announced they've raised $6.2 million in seed funding

on the day of our interview. And just so you know a little bit about what's to come, brands pay Glimps a subscription fee for their products to be featured in short-term rentals. What a clever idea. So smart. So if you're in an Airbnb, for example, and they have a purple

mattress and you're like, oh my God, I love this mattress, which literally happens to me all the time in Airbnb's, you'd be able to buy it directly from a QR code next to the bed. Are they raising? Maybe we should tell. I don't know. It's product placement in the real world. It's not product placement in a movie. It's in your life. What a brilliant idea. Cushing it. All right. Okay, Boomer. Okay, Boomer. I understood the assignment. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another in real life recording of Okay, Boomer. Today, I have

Glimps co-founder on Akash. We're actually at Shop Talk. We met here at Shop Talk. This is a really cool convention. I highly recommend checking it out. But I don't want to focus too much on the convention. I want to focus on Glimps because today they just announced that they raised a six and a half million dollar seed round, which is really incredible. And I'd love to learn a little bit more about Glimps. Cool. Yeah. So with Glimps, what we do is we work with a lot of brands and services and we place their products into short term rentals and resorts as a way to drive like trial and conversion. So as like an end consumer, it's essentially like you go, you stay in like an Airbnb. And the mattress there, instead of just being like a random mattress could be like a Casper mattress or

purple mattress and we provide like a conversion funnel tied to that. So we're essentially providing the distribution network for the brands and all of like the kind of like conversion and stuff tied to that. And we have a network of 8,000 properties that we work with. Wow, that's so sick. So how long can people stay at those rental properties? Yeah. So it's whatever they would normally stay at. So typically we work with high turnover properties. So stay is like under a week, anywhere from like a day or two to like three to four days. And are you guys actually managing these rental properties yourself? Or are you guys going to like Airbnb, Verbo, and then like kind of collabing them with those brands? So we collab at the hosts of the properties directly. Okay. It's like these 8,000 properties represents around like a thousand

individual users and they are users of glimpse for their properties. How do you find like these people that own the properties? Yeah. So it's very like community and word of math driven. So I think like the way our model works, it's really nice for the host. They get like a free product if they're selected to work with the brand and stuff. So whenever someone has that aha moment, they refer a lot of other hosts. It's very like word of mouth driven, community driven, especially since it's around like improving that guest experience. So like these hosts rally around to try to like learn how to be a better host, get better ratings and work with limbs to get better products for their properties. So the first brand that comes to mind that I would love to see in like an Airbnb or

short-term rental would be anchor products. We love anchor at the speaking startup. This isn't sponsored or You think we just really like anchor their tech products. But it would be cool to have like a spare charger or something like that there. Do any of like food brands like collaborate with you guys? Yeah. So we have done like food and snacks in the past. Okay. But we actually launched with more focus on like durable products because you place one product.

You don't need to replenish it or anything. And it just drives like sales and stuff back to the brand. So we have work with brands like liquid death. If you've heard of that. Yeah. Canned water. Right. And like dang chips and stuff.

Okay. We've been more focused on these durable products and are like launching CPGs in the next few quarters. Very, very cool. What's your favorite brand that you guys have featured in the rental properties so far? Well, I love all the rents. Okay, okay. For sure. But so I actually stayed in one of our properties in Park City.

Oh, so sick. Yeah. And then I went on a hike. I didn't bring hiking shoes or anything. I fell like 100 times. Yeah. And I actually fell in love with like the weighted blanket and the massage gun that were in the property. Thera gun or whatever.

That was like, yeah. Yeah. So we're working with the brand called Lyric. That's like a really cool massager. that's like a new innovative take on massage gun. So that type of product and like a weighted blanket brand, like that combination was incredible where I had to buy it for myself as soon as I got home. Very cool.

If you think about it, I was in pain like the whole outside of my body from my hike. And then you have those two things right there. Like you just fall in love with it in that moment. It's really, that can't really happen anywhere else. Right, right. Weighted blankets are awesome. So that's a very cool thing to have there. So we graduated college the same year.

2020, you graduated from Purdue, which like Penn State is in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. How did you decide that? you wanted to become a founder. And then how did also, did you decide that you want to do rental properties? Basically, like, when I was at Purdue, I was really involved in building the student entrepreneurial community. Like, Purdue is a very, like, engineering heavy school.

So there were a few, like, startups coming out of Purdue, but it wasn't, like, a ton relative to, like, what I saw at other schools. So I was really focused on that. And I met my two co-founders and Eugene Kishal, who joined one of the clubs I started. And we actually just started working on startup concepts together just for fun, like a good way to, like, get to know each other. and that's kind of like when I realized that I love doing just like zero to one like just building things like building something that provides value to users and one of the concepts we actually had tied to the fact that

produce kind of like yeah like not necessarily like an urban area was bringing brands to campus to engage with the students so it helped being in a rural area yeah okay that's awesome the reason we saw this was I think HBR max or something was promoting having their services in the dorms and they brought like a fake iron throne oh that's cool Yeah, and it had like a four-hour line on campus. And that's where I realize, yeah, like, there's these students here, like, they are the right target consumer. They're just not in, like, New York or Chicago or whatever. So the way we tested this concept was actually posting a pop-up with a small brand in a U-Haul truck that we parked in the middle of campus. Okay.

And the makers, she drove more sales that she did in her Shopify over a two-week period. Interesting. Which is when we were like, okay, like, there's something here where we can bring brands to consumers where they are, still provide that touch and feel and drive like better conversion. the pop-ups was our initial take on this, but then as we were, like, I was approaching graduation and stuff like that. I was like, how does this become like a venture scale, like large business? And we started talking to like different types of spaces where consumers are a high turnover, but intimate enough where you can trial it and saw like huge pull from the short-term market industry. Was that like before the pandemic happened or is this during the pandemic?

Like literally like January 2020 is when we were thinking about like, okay, maybe not pop-ups. Like let's do short-term mental, it's whatever. four short-term rentals really blew up. Yeah, I would say about like, there was a really strong community. But, yeah, it wasn't necessarily as mainstream as it is today. But it was still like, like, there was like these strong communities. Like we posted like a wait list online and had like 150 hosts sign up in like 24 hours. That's insane.

All focused on, yeah, like elevating their guest experience. And it was so cool to see this segment of users that just cared about how do we make the people staying in our properties as happy as possible. So for, I'm still, I guess, trying to figure a little bit more about glimpse on the user standpoint. So if I wanted to like stay at something that like Glimps had Glimpse like products in it, I would still go to like Airbnb, right? Like it wouldn't necessarily go through Glimbs to find these hosts. It would still be like on that platform. Yeah.

So today like Glimbs is primarily like a B2B platform between the brands and the properties. And then the point of discovery is in the property itself where yeah, it's like you just both. Sometimes you like wouldn't know if you're like glimpse. Okay, okay. There. That's so crazy. Yeah. And then like I mean part of the long term vision is to build that consumer layer where like

glimpse is like equal to discovery. It's like when you think about like glimpse, it's like, okay, there's products around me that I can discover. But today we're building our wedge by like being the distribution layer, providing brands with the opportunity to get into these amazing short term rentals. And then the guest staying in there can really engage with the brands fall in love with it, et cetera. So how do you know like a brand's up for sales? They're like a QR code next to like the weighted blanket or something that they can scan? So it's really focused on like discovery and learning more. So there's a QR code with the product that just like lets you learn more about like like, yeah, like the massage gun or the mattress.

or whatever. And then when you scan it, we actually integrate with like the brand's e-commerce system and their email marketing tools where it's like a direct conversion funnel where if you really loved it, like, you can just scan it and like purchase it directly. We use like unique discount codes and like email captures to attribute it. Or you can like leave your email and then like the brand will probably like engage with you again like after your stay. Okay. But what we've seen is that when someone scans the QR code, they're like truly at a point of really high consideration because they love their product so much that they did want to learn more. Okay, that makes sense. And do the Airbnb people or the hosts have to pay to use Glimbs? No. So today it's actually

like an application basis. So they like apply to join the Glims platform. And once they're there, whenever we work with the brand, we launch the offer to a specific set of properties that fit the criteria. And then if they opt in, then the brand has final say. So it's like a double opt in relationship. Okay. Where like in exchange for the host, like hosting the product and really like elevating it for their guests and stuff, they're getting the product for free. But the brand's also getting complete control over where they want to be. And who wouldn't want like a free purple mattress, like an Airbnb? That totally makes sense.

It's really cool. So I guess now going back to your story, sorry, I keep like popping all over the place, but back to your story, how difficult was it to convince brands to like sign on to this? Be like, yeah, you should let strangers basically like test your product in Airbnb's because I feel like that's like a very difficult, I don't know, way to like trust people. Yeah. Yeah. So I think like for brands, I guess the timing which we started is really,

critical, but brands have been really focused on new ways to get customer, like, to drive customer acquisition. Sharemental marketing. Yeah. And like, we were providing like an experiential channel that's driven by touch and feel. So there's a segment of brands where like if you can actually use the product, like that is a competitive advantage. Like if it's truly like a better brand or a better product, you can't really learn that

unless you touch and feel it. So true. And we were basically providing a scalable way to do that. Like instead of taking the risk to open up your own store in like a high foot traffic area, You can open thousands of showrooms essentially by using the Glims platform. That is so cool. I love that idea. I've actually been really interested in the whole getting to touch and feel products before I buy it because I love Amazon.

I'm not going to lie, guys. Before our interview, I actually had to Instacart a tripod that my phone's sitting on right now because I forgot to bring a tripod because I actually didn't know we were going to be recording. So I forgot a tripod, had to instacart it. So I've been doing online shopping to the max. I love Instacart, Amazon, things like that. but it does come down to the point where there's some products that I really do want to have that experience with it before I shell out the money. Showfields kills it. New York City and Miami. It's a showroom where you can go in, experiment, touch all the stuff. Pop-up grocer, which is a pop-up grocery store. I saw them in Miami. I think they're also New York around the States.

And then there's one based in Soho right now, blanking on the name, but it does. Sustainability and things like that. And that's another pop-up, I believe, that's showing only, like, home goods for, like, the ultra-sustainable people. Like, everything is beige and it looks really aesthetic. And I really like those kind of things, especially, like, since the pandemic where I've really, like, felt like I've missed out on that in-person shopping. I hate shopping malls. Yeah. But there still needs to be a way where you can, like, experiments, you know, with the stuff. Exactly.

Yeah, I know, definitely, like, huge fans of all of those models. I think it's the same thesis that, like, I think for me, it's, like, in 10 years, I still think. think that people will be drawn to things in person and that authentic relationship will still live in person. And like, I think like we're trying to pioneer one of the ways to do that. Got you. And how can people find Glimpse? Yeah. So, um, all social meets. So we have a website, tryglymns.com. On LinkedIn, we're like Glimps.com, I think. On Twitter, we're try underscore Glims. Cool. Um, but Try Glims is kind of like the main name. And I'm sure if you search up like Glims product placements or something like that, you'll find us.

Awesome. Yeah, and then our Instagram is really cool. We showcase a lot of the products that are in properties. Yeah, so you can actually see what the experience looks like. That's really, really cool. And then where can people find you if they want to reach out? Yeah, so best would be like LinkedIn or Twitter. And then my email is just my first name at triglymns.com.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for talking. Yeah, thank you. This is a really cool interview. Yeah, thank you so much. Let me know how I did, guys. Like I said, this is like my third ever in-person interview. This is very last minute.

I think it went really well. Again, thank you so much for being on. Yeah, thank you. Thanks. Hey, everyone. Producer Nick here. I want to tell you about the SaaS Syndicate. If you're a founder of a SaaS company with a product and market,

our investment team wants to talk to you. Head over to the syndicate.com slash SaaS, SAAAS, to apply to raise from the SaaS Syndicate. And you can join Jason's syndicate of over 9,000 accredited investors at the syndicate.com. Producer Justin here, no cool startup? Check out openscouting.com, where anyone can refer a startup to our investment. team here at launch, even if you don't know the founder. If you're the first to flag a company for us

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