This Week in Startups - How Apple can win podcasting, Bezos' leadership, MBAs raising search funds & FDNY robodogs | E1415

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

Tuesday news day! Jason and Molly break down the following stories: Apple's "new" creator tools, and brainstorming on how they could dominate podcasting again (2:23), Jeff Bezos' letter to shareholders from 2000, when Amazon's share price was down ~80% from its dot-com bubble peak (16:02), understanding search funds and why elite MBA grads are raising them (38:23). Finally, they wrap with a WLiTF segment about the FDNY purchasing a couple of Boston Dynamics "robodogs" to help with search and rescue missions. (47:15)

All right, everybody, it's Tuesday, and we have a good-sized new show for you today. It's a really brainstorming type episode. We get into a lot of interesting topics. And first up, we talk about Apple's new podcast features that they're finally rolling out. But I started brainstorming. Why doesn't Apple make podcasting hardware? Seriously, though. Why don't they?

Seriously, though. So we're going to talk about that. Then we talk about leadership and how to navigate choppy waters as a CEO, specifically in this case, we're calling back to Jeff Bezos's letter to shareholders from 2000 when Amazon stock was down 80% from its dot-com bubble peak, which is a position some other companies are in right now. Ouchy poo. And then we talk about something that's been going on since the 80s that we were not aware of.

These are called search funds. They're a device where MBA, elite MBAs from, you know, think Harvard or Stanford, do a search fund where they raise money to acquire a company and then operate this private company and then flip it a couple of years later. Really interesting device that I'd never heard about and we'll give you a little education on that. It might be interesting for some of you to think about.

And then finally, yes, we do live in the future. And this falls into the category of a future that is finally here. The FDNY, the New York Fire Department, has purchased a couple of those robots from Boston Dynamics that used to only watch on YouTube. Now they are in fact going to be running into dangerous situations and doing search and rescue. And Molly and I brainstorm a half dozen other robots that could save lives.

And we'd like your help on brainstorming of some of those and maybe inspiring technologists and entrepreneurs to build them. It's going to be a great show. It really is. Stick with us. This Weekend Startups is brought to by LinkedIn Marketing. To redeem a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com slash this weekend startups. Notion is one place for notes, docs, projects, and everyday work that goes way beyond a wiki. Go to Notion.S.O and use promo code Twist to get $250 off an annual team plan.

And ITrust Capital. Did you know that you can invest in crypto through your retirement account and still get the same tax advantages as a traditional IRA? Visititrust.competal slash twist to start investing today. Welcome back to the news. It is News Tuesday. this early part of the week this is working for us to do the news you know, maybe ease into an interview and things calm down, but so far they show

no sign of doing that and topics large and small. Today, actually, a little inside baseball on the podcast, we're going to talk about podcasting because Apple has rolled out some new creator tools for their podcast connect premium service starting today.

Now, Apple, of course, early to cornering the market in podcasting. I mean, it was named after their device. Like, they have just owned this market. And now you can upload an MP3. What? This is their big innovation. You can upload your MP3 to Apple.

And you can see how many people follow you. Get this. In the year of our Lord 2022 in the podcasting economy, you can now see how many people follow you. and upload an MP3. Fantastic. So, monthly,

next month, the users will be able to see the metrics for followers on Apple Podcast. So if somebody follows, I think that also means subscribe. You can see the number. That's great. And you can see the new followers.

And it's going to be, I think some pain is going to occur across the industry here. Oh, I see, yeah. So maybe if you didn't have like a good follower account, but I think if followers are tied to subscribers, those two things,

should be the same thing, right? I think they're the same thing. I'm pretty sure they are because Apple cannot deal with normal nomenclature and they changed it from subscribe to follow. I think, remember when they got the checkmark or the add the plus button? Because I think they determined that it was confusing to say subscribe because it made people think they had to pay. So now they call it followers.

So when they say they're going to give you the follower count, they mean subscribing. Way to break the nomenclature. Yeah. I just, I mean. And then they have been. promising metrics, as we know for... Yeah.

15 years, maybe longer. And so they're now going to finally do that. The premium audio subscriptions will include support for MP3s. Apple previously only allowed premium content to be uploaded as Wave files. They have a program called Jump Start now, which costs $20 a year and include support from Apple's podcasting team on how to set up a channel and understand your podcast metrics. So you could pay for stuff you could find on Duck Duck, All right.

So that is, it sounds silly. I mean, it's very helpful. But what I would say is if it's a starting point to get more people onboarded and to filter who's serious and who's not, maybe not a bad idea. Like, just if like, okay, they're saying like setting up a channel, understanding podcast metrics and more. The end more over the next coming years might be like actually kind of cool. If they taught people because they are the great irony of this. I think you said it really well, Molly, is like podcasting fellow.

on their lap. And what if they took this as seriously as, or maybe this is actually a red flag, what if they took it as seriously as video editing and audio editing in that creator class? If they started looking at podcasters the same as the video editors and the photographers and that creative class,

they could actually maybe make a run here. What if the hardware at some point supported podcasting? So what I mean by that is, you know, they came out with the studio. What if the studio included a podcast microphone and Apple came out with a podcast microphone? Would that thing sell like crazy? What if Apple came out with a teleprompter? That sounds crazy.

Or they came out with a better webcam specifically for podcasting. And if they started saying, hey, we're going to make hardware for podcasting, that'd be pretty great. What about a lighting kit? What if they put lighting on that snapped onto the top of that studio monitor? Totally. So I hate to have to like do your work Apple, but look at what every podcaster needs. a light ring, a microphone, you know, like the ability to set your gain, all this like kind of stuff, a camera, and just own that. And then like, don't even try to make money off it.

Just try to make Zoom calls and then go buy Zencaster or something and build that into Apple. So that would be the power move if the Apple podcasting app also allowed you to create a podcast. I mean, they could become, it could even be bigger than podcasting. It could be creators writ large. Like Apple could be like, we are into creator. Precisely. We are the, you know, we have always been the brand for creators and now we're the brand for the creator economy. Like, that would be phenomenal. And no one there is under 150 years old.

Sometimes it feels like. So they, I don't know. Maybe this is a move in that direction. It feels like if what you're trying to do is get to beautiful basics, then maybe a big announcement about it is, like, this could have been rolled out. a little more quietly and not been so kind of painful feeling in terms of rolling out. I mean, really simplistic stuff. The other thing, though, I think we should note is speaking of Apple making money off creators, they are now going to take a 30% cut of podcast subscription revenue in year one,

and then take a 15% cut in year two. We should compare this to Spotify, which takes a 0% cut for the first two years. And then in year three, we'll start taking 5% for premium content. and Spotify already, evidently, is the biggest podcast platform. That's what people are using more than Apple. I think this is a good wake-up call for Apple. Basically, they had their milkshake drunk by Daniel. And Daniel went big.

He's spending money, and he's a software first company, where Apple is a hardware company. So if you want to win in a competition, you must press what is your strength. So if you want to beat Spotify, I am dead serious. Podcasting camera, podcasting microphone, podcasting lighting kit, and then all podcasting hosting and storage of the files free. Like if Apple said to us, we'll pay for all your transfer for this week in startups and for all in. That's a lot of money. I spend over $100,000 serving up these files.

And Leo Lipport would talk about this all the time. You put up big video files, you do all this stuff. Well, YouTube makes it free. Right? we don't pay for our YouTube video, this is what Apple should do. The next thing Apple should do is they should provide free hosting,

100% free hosting and just eat the Apple, the transfer. Then when I put our RSS feed on Spotify, Spotify is loading the video files and loading the audio files from Apple iCloud servers. That is how you win.

And then anybody who does that, you say, you will host your stuff if you say, hosted at Apple. You know, or something like that. Or it could be, it could be if you do a subscription service, you get hosted for free. That's the way to do it. So then you drive people to the hosting me.

I'm here all day. Apple, just call me. I know. I'm just like, in this, by the way, it's for free. And then just buy them this idea for free. And then buy Zencaster, which allows you to just have two or three. And Zencastr is so well done. It's one of my former developers at Mahalo slash Inside, launch that company.

And I tried to invest a couple times. We could work it out. But Zencaster, and what's the other one that competes with Zencastr? So buy Riverside or buy Zancaster because those stitch together the podcast and they make it easy. You don't need a video editor or an audio. You don't need an audio editor really. I mean, it would be better if you did, but you can basically get by with that. And then make that an Apple podcast recording software.

Yeah. Kind of like they give you garage band for free, right? And there's a video editor that comes with Max. And it's 100. Exactly. It's like 100% in their DNA to become a creator economy platform. Apple enabler, you know, go all in on the creator economy. Notice that it's happening up there in the old white guy C suite that Apple has going on and use it to sell your devices.

Like it will sell your devices. Yeah. So make it Apple comes with iMovie, garage band, and Zencaster. So Apple Zencaster. Then you would look at this and say, because if you buy a Mac as a consumer, What are you more likely to do? Edit movies, make an album, or make a podcast? Out of 100 users, 100% probably would be more likely to make a podcast.

I'd say 80% of people who buy a Mac would be like, oh, I can make a podcast. As opposed to I'm going to make, you know, a movie, you know, a short film or an album. And they sold the podcaster bundle? Yes, podcast or bundle. And you buy a new Mac and you get the podcaster bundle. And it comes with a really pretty. pretty light that actually works because having shopped for ring lights, even up to recently,

they're all janky and they break immediately. You know, they're like pretty trashy. So make a good one. Everything's trash, yes. Make either make a new camera or make the camera like, you know, I don't know, adjustable and have like a depth of field and all of the cool things that are built

into iPhone cameras. And I mean, and then start, you know, bundling and selling like the cool, like the low profile headphones, ear in ear. I mean,

come on. Um, oh, come on. Come on. I mean, this is so obvious. I mean, it's just so obvious what they should do. And, you know, there's something Spotify can't do.

Spotify cannot spin up a hardware division. They did make that little Spotify thing or something that was to connect old cars, you know, like an FM to Bluetooth dongle for cars. Remember that Spotify thing? What was it called? Oh, yeah. I think that's like a little hardware device. It's like called the car thing.

Did they call it car thing? Yeah. I thought you were being funny like that Simpsons where he's trying to remember the name of the movie Speed. It's like the bus has to go below a certain speed goes below that speed.

What is that movie called? Yes, that is a car thing. It's kind of brilliant branding. That thing doesn't exist. So I was like, what's that thing? What's Colin? Is Colin, the Nodies are referencing Colin, which I think might be similar.

Oh, Colin is David Sacks's app for doing he took Clubhouse and then he made it so you save the video, the audio file so you can kind of do a podcast. I do remember that. Which you can now do. That was kind of my idea.

I told him like, don't do call and do like take. I advised him to instead of doing a clubhouse competitor, look at it as a podcast producing more like Zancaster, where you do a live show, but then it produces it like sort of like a podcasting feed. And so when you pull up on call, and we're investors in the company as well. Right.

Put a little, put a little slit in a little milly. Put a little million there. So congratulations to call-in team. It's kind of working. It has gone a little bit to the right where a clubhouse was on the left. Because of David's audience. I can believe it. Well, Glenn Greenwald's got a show on there or whatever.

Now I'm remembering that they actually emailed me and asked if I wanted to do a show there. Like in December before I started here, I don't know if it's, and we're like, this was weird. But in the email, it was like, is this stuff I shouldn't be saying? this podcast anyway. In the email, they were like, oh, we noticed that Glenn Greenwald follows you on Twitter. So we thought you might want to do a show on Colin. I was like, quite the opposite. That might not be the right. I mean, that's the problem with these platforms is like, for examining me. No, I mean, if you're the, the way politics works today and the way these kind of themes work is, if you get a base in one group, it kind of can block you from getting a base in the other group.

It's kind of weird, but yeah, it's the way it works. Serious XM has done a good job of balancing that. They have right-wing people and left-wing people on the same platform. But anyway, that's a topic for another show. Let's talk about leadership, shall we? Exactly. Pivot to leadership. Hey, Tom Eschbacher is here with us again.

He's a senior sales manager at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. And we're talking about their amazing report today in startup marketing, as well as how to use LinkedIn to grow your startup as an angel investor. I like to see revenue early and often from startups. How can LinkedIn help with that? Yeah, the short answer is LinkedIn forums. 89% of our startup advertisers utilize them. And I'll tell you why.

Think about all the effort that goes into creating interest within a prospect. You have to nail the value proposition, create compelling content, find them, and then message them with enough frequency so that they engage. You do all that. You get them to your signup page and you know how many of them are going to convert? Just 2%. That's so much value.

that marketers are failing to capture, and it's a big reason why LinkedIn marketing and specifically LinkedIn LeadGen forms are so popular with startups. So people know a lead gen form lives on LinkedIn. They click one time and boom, the email is sent to the company. By using LinkedIn forms, you're ensuring they're coming from an audience that you care about,

and then we're pulling the information right from the member's profile. So it's great. Your SDRs are going to be thrilled with that info. They're going to want to follow up. That's the improved lead quality. And as you say, Jason, it all takes place in just two taps in the LinkedIn news feed. And so if you would like to get this incredible report, you can go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. And not only can you get the report for free, you're also going to get $100 off your first marketing campaign from Tom at LinkedIn.

Way to go, Tom. Somebody tweeted the other day something really interesting. It was Jeff Bezos's 2000 annual letter to shareholders. It's a really quick read. And it's pretty amazing. Now, when I say his 2000 annual letter to shareholders, he does this annual letter. This is the one from the year 2000, which was a bit, a bit of a rough year. And so we thought it might be instructive to read this.

And since Molly has a delightful voice and I sound like, you know, horrible and nobody's asking me to do voiceovers for their books. Let's have the pro do it. Molly, why don't you read a couple of lines and then pause whenever you want and we'll comment on it? Yeah, so we should, for some specifics here, Amazon had IPOed in May 1997 at $18 a share during the dot-com peak. They hit $113, but then by the end of the year 2000, their stock was down about 80%. So the reason it's instructive is because that's kind of happening right now if you're Zoom, Twilio, Shopify, or Square. So here's how Bezos handled it back then. Quote, to our shareholders, ouch.

There's more, but I just love that. I mean, for an opening, you know, you want to grab somebody. They always say like when you're writing a book, you want to grab them with that like first, you know, chapter or first paragraph. Ouch is a pretty strong start. It's a pretty good one. Yep, pretty good one. It's been, he went on a brutal year for many in the capital markets and certainly for Amazon.com shareholders. As of this writing, our shares are down more than 80% from when I wrote you last year.

Nevertheless, by almost any measure, Amazon.com, the company is in a stronger position now. than at any time in its past. We served 20 million customers in 2000, up from 14 million in 1999. Sales grew to 2.76 billion in 2000 from 1.64 billion in 1999. Pro forma operating loss shrank to 6% of sales in Q4-2000 from 26% of sales in Q41999.

Pro forma operating law. Flah, flah, flaf. And then from here, there are a bunch of numbers saying how great Amazon was. And then he says, I'm going to skip ahead past the number to clearly there was a lot of voting going on in the boom year of 99 and much less weighing. We're a company that wants to be weighed and over time we will be.

Over the long term, all companies are in the meantime. We have our heads down working to build a heavier and heavier company. Okay, so this is brilliant. What he's referencing here is there is some famous line about ultimately the stock market is a weighing machine. It weighs your customers and your earnings and your cash flow and all that kind of stuff. So first people vote on your stock. And what that means is they're voting like you're going to complete the mission and you're going to take this vision and make it a reality.

So people vote with that IPO, right? But that over time, they're kind of just looking at the numbers and weighing it versus other things in the marketplace of stocks. There were a couple of numbers here. And you got to love the brutal honesty of just saying, ouch, right? I know. Because the stock had been, I think, did we mention how much the stock had tanked here? It was down 80%.

Yeah. So this is very similar to Peloton or Zoom in this moment, right? I think those were in that well above 50% collapse. So that's why this is kind of instructive of how to deal at the stock market and your own employees. Because this letter goes to your employees and your senior management, as much as it goes to your shareholders. You're really trying to look at this concept of stakeholders. Your customers are stakeholders.

Do they care about your stock going down? Some might. That might have some perception, right? You can't be good to be a Peloton, own a Peloton like I do, and see the stock crash and the CEO go out and you're like, oh, is my Peloton? Should I buy another Peloton? A stock crash can spook people from buying and engaging with your product. So you do, that's a stakeholder that matters, right?

For sure. Your employees have options. And this is a Shackleton leadership moment. Are you going to define reality and are you going to define reality in an intellectually honest way? The reality is your stock and your future is worth 80% less VP of X, EVP of Y in your company. We know that you and your partner and your kids were thinking about going to Hawaii, buying a second home, you know, getting a jet card.

I know this sounds silly, but the leaders of these companies are the ones who have to fight the battle. Your generals just watch their $10 million in stock or $100 million in stock or $5 million in stock or some, you know, director who had a million in stock. They just sort of go to $200,000 or that $10 million go to two. And they might have been making life plans based on having a $10 million net worth or a million dollar. I know boo-hoo to senior executives, but that can get in their head. No, it's, of course. I mean, they're there. They're also voting by being there. Correct. Benjamin Graham, we were weirdly missing that part of the letter. But yes, he said it was the famed investor, Benjamin Graham, who said this.

What I think is interesting about this email is that, like, it opens and it's like, you know, out, and it's very honest. And then it's like got this, you know, the nice voting versus weighing metaphor. But it's also like, it's so Jeff Bezos because it's just like, data, data, data, here are all of the, here are all of the data reasons why the data is super and everything is fine. And if you compare that to like, you know, Barry McCarthy's letter. which is there's no sugar-coating this. It's a bitter pill.

In my experience, though, the sting has a long half-life. Like, the hard truth is either revenue had to grow faster or spending had to shrink. I'm here for the comeback story. That's why I think we can pull it off, the love of our members. It's personal, right?

Like, it's actually, it's like an inspiring, exciting speech. Like, you would have, you're like, ah, let's go get a moment after it. Whereas Jeff Bezos is like, the data's great. It's going to be fine. So this is kind of like being a pilot.

They say pilots need to aviate, navigate, communicate. When I listen to the Blanco-Lyrio channel on YouTube, this guy who takes every accident and, you know, details them. And really tragically, there was just that Chinese 737 that fell out of the sky. I don't know if you saw that video. It's horrific. It's horrific. It's horrific. And my hearts go out to the families.

But that aviate, navigate, communicate in a crisis always stuck with me. This is why I like to geek out to other disciplines and learn them. I'm not saying I want to be a pilot, but I do like to watch these pilot videos where they go over things. The number one thing he needs to do is keep the company a solvent and keep everybody working, right? That's Aviate. You have to, that's operate. So, AV8 equals operate for people in this company. They need to keep operating the business.

They need to keep growing sales and users. So first and foremost, you got to keep the plane in the air. So before you start talking to the tower and trying to figure out where to land, just make sure the plane is not doing a nosedive and you're keeping at level and you're aviating. Well, then you've got to navigate. Well, in this letter, that's the next piece, is where are we going, right? And then communicates the last one, which is the letter itself.

So I immediately when I read this was like, aviate, navigate, communicate, communicate. operate and then plan. I mean, he's used the word navigate, but operate, navigate, communicate is what's going on here. And I think the letter just does that so eloquently, so perfectly. The Bezos letter or the Barry letter? I'm not sure about the Bezos letter right now.

You're still talking about the Bezos? Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. This wouldn't, and it might just be that like fundamentally I'm a creative. I don't see the future here. Okay. Well, like I'm looking at it and it's sort of like, we like don't get me wrong.

I like a we crushed it email. Yeah. This is a great we crushed it. Like he's like, the numbers don't tell the whole story. Right. The stock market, rather.

The stock market is not the economy, as Kyrist all would say. Yeah. The actual Amazon economy is this. And so I'm not that worried about it. Well, I think also. But there's not a lot in there that's just like,

and next. Well, we just have the opening letter. I'm sure there's a lot more going down there. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. But I kind of think. I'm just saying me personally,

I'd rather get a letter from Barry. Yeah, well, I like the AVIte information is so crisp for him that the international sales grew, you know, the customers grew. If you, when you kind of outline that for folks, you're kind of tipping your cards that, hey, it's going to go to the next level. But yeah, comparing it to CEO Barry McRoffey's, yeah, he's got a really good clear navigate going forward. It's just incredible. And that was, by the way, Bezos letter is just page one. So we could go into the next pages and go through what he. Maybe page two has the feeling.

Feelings. Maybe it has more feelings, yes. We're not even feelings, but the rallying cry, right? Like, I think that's what I'm missing from just the numbers is the rallying cry, but I bet it is in page two. And what it really shows, though, I'm like parsing, overly parsing here. But what it really shows is a guy who is not at all panicked. No.

About that scenario. And that actually is what you really want in your pilot, right? Like, I love, I always find it really reassuring to listen in, you know, like on United. You used to be able to go to like Channel 1 and you could listen in to what they're saying. And it's so lovely to hear them just be like, we're going to go over to four or nine or runway. That's pilot ASMR for me. Pilot ASMR. They're like, oh, Bravo. We're coming in on a and you're like, they're just set word. Roger that. And you're just like, oh, they're not worried in these turbulence. I guess I don't need to be. They like that. We have a level four chop, you know,

they're cool as cucumbers. So this is like in both these instances, the analogy we're going to go aviation is you lost one of the two engines. And I think what they're both doing. I'm saying, listen, losing an engine is not good, but here's how we're going to land the plane. Yeah. So just great job. Stay calm in an emergency. You've got to channel your calm. When I worked on the ambulance in Brooklyn, that was what I saw from the senior folks ahead of me, is when we pulled up, you know, like your adrenaline is going crazy.

And they were just cool as cucumbers. We'd walk up to an accident. There'd be two cars, pieces of cars everywhere, airbags. And, you know, they were just very cool, methodical. Okay, triage this person first. Then we're going to do this person. We need the vitals. You do the vitals on this person.

I'm going to do the vitals here. Boom. Okay, is the airway compromise? Okay, are they breathing? Okay, let's check the circulation. ABC, you know, airway breathing circulation was the acronym there. So think about that when you're running your business, you know, do you understand the reality of your business?

Do you understand how many months of runway you have left? How much revenue you actually have? How much cash is actually in your bank account? These are the things that you need to know. Your growth rate, your burn. What are you spending? What happens if that? marketing spend goes away. Does your customer go away? Really great stuff.

Startups need a central hub to store information and collaborate on work now more than ever. That's because we're all living in this crazy remote world. Everybody wants to put all the information in one place and that one place is now Notion. Documents, projects, all that stuff. It kind of goes in the same place on what you can consider a wiki. When we went fully remote in March of 2020, Notion became our internal knowledge. bank. We even use it for external purposes. You know, like when we did this series on This Weekend Startups called the Startup Checklist. Well, we just put it at Thisweekandstartups.com slash checklist. And that is all hosted on Notion. On Notion, every team from engineering to

sales can work together seamlessly. And they have 500 integrated apps, including things like Google and Slack. Collaborate in real time and tailor workflows to your needs. Hundreds of thousands of teams worldwide are already delighting their employees with Notion. Notion is now a worldwide community of millions, and they're creating templates and tutorials, so the product is continually improving. Just go to notion.s.o and use the promo code twist, and you will get $250 off their annual team plan. That could be a couple of months for free, so it's pretty great for a growing startup like yours. That's notion.s.o and use that promo code twist during checkout for $250 off. By the way, producer Nick just on it, putting in pieces of page two, which are classically and wonderfully Bezos-esque.

Let's move to the future. Why should you be optimistic about the future of e-commerce and the future of Amazon.com? And there he goes. And then a bunch of data about why you should be. So then there you go. He's got it. He's got it. He doesn't need an editor.

No. Here's the best part. These improvements in customer experience will be driven by innovations made possible by dramatic increases in available bandwidth, distance, space. and processing power, all of which are getting cheap fast. Price performance of processing power is doubling about every 18 months. Moore's Law. Price performance of disk space is doubling about every 12 months, and price performance of bandwidth is doubling every nine months.

Given that last doubling rate, Amazon will be able to use 60 times as much bandwidth per customer five years from now while holding our bandwidth costs per customer constant. Similarly, price performance improvements in disk space and processing power will allow us for example, to do even better real-time personalization of our website. Yeah, no, I'm right. Let that sink in. I'm right.

What year was AWS launched? Like, I don't know that he totally sees the future and really needed to have somebody with some feelings write this letter for him. I'm just saying both of these things are totally true because the vision of the future and the realization of what is going to be possible is incredible. And if I were sitting there right there like, I have made a horrible mistake. quit my job at an accounting firm. I came to this thing. This thing is like dragging me down to the bottom of the ocean. And it was like, no, no, no, don't worry because more laws. They're doubling every year and we're going to be able to provide this much cheaper. This space is going to be cheaper. I'd be like, yeah, I'm out. It's really interesting, though. This is six years before they launched

Amazon Web Services. So what you're seeing is the formation of AWS in his mind. He is, because he's so in the weeds, and this is why being in the weeds in your business and understanding stuff from a principles basis is so important for founders. And when we invest in founders, we're looking for people to understand that. If they understand how the, this is the why now, the why now here that he's predicting is, wait a second, if these things are doubling every 16 months or 12 months, wait, that's a crazy growth rate. What would happen if that continued in 10 years? And so if you were looking at bandwidth of mobile phones, you would be like, oh, if you're running Netflix, You could easily say, wait a second, we could actually stream it to people's phones.

And there must have been a time where Reed Hastings realized, wait a second. If I can watch, if I can upload a photo for my phone, my new iPhone with 3G, or even before that, they start to understand like, okay, what would the product look like if 95% of the cost was removed? If 95% of the cost is removed for storage, you can actually do YouTube. YouTube, the why now for YouTube, was specifically that storage and bandwidth went from being a penalizing, a punitive function of your video becoming popular

to being free. What do I mean by that? If you had a video go viral on the internet before 2005, your website would go down because they had bandwidth caps and storage caps, and you would basically, We would say like, okay, you have a $2,000 web hosting bill and we shut your website down. Remember those days, Molly?

Mm-hmm. You'd be like, I really want to see that video. And it's like, yeah, just too many people want to see it. Therefore, it has to go away. Yeah. Think about that as a dynamic on the internet. Yeah. If popular, nobody can see it.

That's how the internet used to work. Right. Now it's like, how do we make this thing popular? How do we get it to trend? And like, storage is not even in people's conception of being important. Yeah. It's so fascinating. It's literally like these two incredible things happening at the same time,

like emotional intelligence, but vision, like unwavering, crystal clear vision of the future that allowed them to build a business that ultimately made all those people rich. If you want to understand how investors think about companies, think about there was a moment in time where Amazon went from 60 million customers to 20 million. So when you see another company, I don't know, Robin Hood, get to 20 million customers, or Lyft or DoorDash or Uber or Airbnb, what you're seeing in the signaling and the signal processing of investors, whether it's public market or private market,

is, hey, we have seen this movie before. If somebody can get to 10 or 20 million, they can certainly get to 50 or 100 or 200. So I always make those jumps in my mind. If somebody can get to $100,000 in SaaS revenue across 100 customers paying $1,000 a year each, okay, well, there's going to be customers out there who'll pay $10,000 and there's got to be, you know, we could add a zero to this and then add another zero. So let's make the bet, right? And that's really what you're doing as an investor. So really a lot of great lessons here.

And thanks to Jeff Erlickman, who was the person who shared this. And we basically saw him share it and then we put it here. He does like great little tweets where he. does, like here's a cool John Erickman tweet. He had this format. I don't know if he came up with it, but I see people doing it, and I find it super compelling. Here's one he just did a couple of seconds ago.

Revenue generated each second for Walmart, Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft. So we've got to pull that out. And, you know, it's a very cool, he does back of the envelope math like I do, but he does it in a very interesting, compelling way. And these things really start to go viral when he does it. So he's really much of that. This is a mesmerizing tweet. The revenue generated each second.

Wow. Yeah. For those of you who are not watching on video, yes. The winner on this list is Walmart at $19,659 generated each second. Yes, but now do their margin. So their margin is like whatever, 2%, 4%. Number three on the list is Apple at $15,934.

So $4,000 less, right? So whatever that is, 20% less. But what's Apple's margin? 50%? Yeah. Love that. And then Google is half, but their margin is 80%. So really you start to understand these companies.

Look at Disney down there. Huh. Hmm. I was thinking, you know, we do this, I have an idea for a new segment. I was thinking we take the money that every, when I teach the Angel University, we will take the profits from that. So we spend a little bit on marketing. We charge, I think, 300 to take it or something, or $4.

to take it. 500 people come. And so we spend a little bit on marketing. Whatever the profits are, we give to charity. I think we've given $175,000 to charity. Here's my idea, producer Nick. What if we took that money? And instead of just, you know, every year putting it out,

we put it into a charitable trust. And then on this show, we made trades based on it. So if there was $175,000 in there right now, and we said, you know what, this Peloton's good. I like the new CEO and we think it's low. let's put $5,000 into Peloton. Would that be interesting for the audience if they could watch us trade

those donations and then hopefully the donations do well and every year we give some of it away, right? Would that be interesting, Nick? I'm feeling like a little bit of SEC breathing down my neck here about, but I guess so. No, it'd be like...

I don't know. It'd be like these live traders. Like really trading or like pretend trading? No, I'm talking about actually trading. I think you are a master, master entertainer, Jason, and that is a brilliant idea. here's the butt but it's a horrifying

concept to lose a bunch of charity money Yolo and on Bullitton. What are the Ford Foundation all these people do? They make bets with this. No, no, you're totally right, but they have, you know, I don't know. Basically, I'm saying day trade the donations.

Let's day trade the donations. Yeah. No, but we would buy Disney and hold it. We'd say like, listen, we think Disney is a great company. We could do it also based on what we think Are companies doing good things in the world? Anyway, let's put a pin in it, but I think it's an interesting idea. All right, let's do another story.

It is the interesting to, I think would be more interesting is to wait for a market bottom out like we might be seeing right now. Because of your classic phrase fortunes are made in the down market and collected in the up market. Yes. And we like keeping the trust, but only ever trading when there is like a 15% intraday declines. like some crazy crash. That would be cool, I think. That's my thought. Yeah, that's my thought.

When there's blood in the streets, we buy property. For you. For charity, for good. Listen, pretty much everybody knows someone who has invested in crypto at this point, and lots of people have exposure to different tokens themselves. But did you know that you can now invest in crypto through your retirement account? That's right. With I trust capital, you can buy and sell cryptocurrencies from a crypto IRA.

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investment with risk of loss. High Trust Capital, Inc. does not provide legal investment or tax advice. Consult with a qualified legal investment in tax professional. Yeah, this is fascinating. So MBA grads who have a lot of options available to them, but

want to find them more quickly, I think, are raising something called search funds at a faster pace than ever before. A search fund is where an MBA raises capital from investors with the intent of finding and acquiring a privately held business to run as a CEO and co-owner. Evidently, according to the Wall Street Journal, this has been around for a long time, but since about 2019, as investors, as we know, are flush with cash and looking for new ways to

deploy capital, this has gotten more popular. So according to Stanford's Graduate School of Business, there were 51 new search funds in 2019, which was then an all-time high. There were at least 70, in 2020, and then it is estimated that more of them launched in 2021. Apparently, a study of nearly 400 of these funds through 2019 found that 75% of the companies acquired by searchers yielded a positive return for investors, and of those 75%, 69% delivered at least double the return on investment. I still have questions about the mechanics of this. Yeah, it's a very interesting concept.

I was looking at Stanford Business School, GBS's website, and just quoting from their research, a search fund is an investment vehicle conceived in 1984, through which investors financially support an entrepreneur's effort to locate, acquire, manage, and grow a privately held company. In other words, it's kind of like a SPAC, right? It's like a SPAC. Exactly. But for like a specific person. It's like a SPAC.

Of a CEO. It's a CEO SPAC. There we go. CEO SPAC. Well said. So the model. offers relatively inexperienced entrepreneurs with limited capital resources, a quick path to managing a company in which they have a meaningful ownership position. Since 1996, CES has conducted

a series of studies on the performance of search runs. See links below. CES has identified, and we'll put this link in the show notes, has identified and tracked more than 400 search runs raised since 1984 in the United States. In Canada, the growing cohort of international funds located throughout Western Europe, Latin American, India are tracked by our counterparts at school in Barcelona. It's really interesting. The aggregate pre-tax internal rate of return,

I-R, 32.6%. What? And the aggregate pre-tax return on invested capital to be 5.5x. So this is kind of interesting. How does the investor

get paid back on the performance of the company that the CEO is running? They take some sort of an equity position in the company. And then if the CEO does well, you're buying the company, right? Correct.

Yeah. So they would own the stock. So I don't know what the typical size of these are, but let's just say they buy a $5 million business. I don't think we're talking about building $100 million businesses, but let's say, let's make it a $10 million a business. A bunch of investors put up $10 million. Somebody buys a business with $2 million, with $4 million in revenue. You know, let's say it's like a manufacturing type business or a product business.

They buy it for $4 million because software businesses don't need this. I don't think because software. businesses have, venture capital, but let's say you bought some mom and pop business that had grown to $4 million making widgets. Acme widgets making $4 million. You buy it for $10 million.

You give the founder or the young CEO, the very young CEO, and as they say, 20% ownership and they got to stick around for five years to get it. They vested over time. I'm guessing there's some vesting schedule here. Now they own 20% of a business worth $10 million. So they get $2 million out of school,

plus a salary, the thing's making $4 million. Let's say over 10 years, they 5x the revenue. Now you got $20 million in revenue. If this thing is getting paid off at two and a half times, now you've got $50 million in valuation. They went from $10 to $50. The investors also had their dollars. They bought it for $10 million.

They get $50 million back. $5X cash on cash. According to the Wall Street Journal, search fund managers typically hold the businesses for six to 10 years before exiting. It noted that many of them exit to private equity firms, so most likely they're buying mom and pop businesses for cheap putting a Stanford

GSB grad on third base here and then they increase operational efficiency and exit to PE I don't know how I feel about this. It seems like they're now looking to buy I'm just quoting from a Berkeley because it seems like maybe this is a device that they teach in MBA programs

to encourage people to maybe not go to work at like some consulting firm and I'm just quoting they're now looking to buy a company with a minimum of $1.5 million in earnings before interest taxes depreciation, blah, blah, blah, EBTA. So they're looking for $1.5 million in profits on revenue of up to $50 million and a clear path of repetitive businesses from existing customers.

Our job is to find companies that aren't actively for sale and figure out where they are financially before it gets to the point where they want to be more formal, Greenberg said. So I think this is the key. You go find businesses and then you try to find the owner. You say, hey, I'm a graduate student. I'm looking to buy a business, wondering what your business does. So you're looking for these diamonds in the rough. One of those was Survey Monkey.

Survey Monkey was being run by like 20 people. It was massively profitable. And my friend Dave Goldberg, rest in peace, had bought it. And, you know, it was kind of like MailChimp in a way. Kind of funny that they both were primate-based naming conventions. But the folks who were running MailChimp decided we're not going to sell this to a private equity fund. We're just going to take it all the way and sell it whenever they sold it for billions of dollars. But there are little software companies out.

there that people make. Wow. And you know, you have to have a lot of energy to do this too because you're buying, you have to find the business, then you have to clean the business up. You know, what are the chances the business is being run at a high level? So what the arbitrage here, I believe is a mom and pop business got product market fit. It was growing nicely. But if you brought in professional management, quote unquote, with a great skill set and a

young person with, you know, crazy energy who wants to prove themselves, I think that's the bet that these investors are making. A crazy, because crazy, and I hate to say the word young, because it is ageist, but energy in investors' mind fades over time for most people. They become rich, they become 50, 60 years old, they say, hey, I want to ski 40 days, you know, this year or whatever. They come up with some stupid metric that, you know, they want to live some epic life. And, you know, at 50 years old, they decide that's the time they need to hit 40 days of skiing for some Godforsaken reason. It's the circle of life. It is a circle of life.

I hit 37 just for folks. And then Mark Pinkis then DM'd me when I said 36 days the other day and he was like 59. What a monster. Mark Pinkis monster. He's my guy, but come on, Mark. He's like 59 for you. Well, you know, I started in basically. Is he making his own snow in his backyard?

Like, what the hell? He also, you know, that lives, the ski lifestyle, but he, I think he got started before me. This season, I started December 24th skiing. So I could have skied one more month and put it in 20 days two. You'll get him next year. I got him here in November.

You'll get him next year in a meaningless metric. Well, I'm using an app called Slopes, Molly. A shout out to whoever made slopes that is on your watch and on your phone. It tracks everything you do, every run you do, speeds, elevation, everything. It's wonderful. It costs $30 a year, which is nothing. Every time you tell me about this. I'm just like, just watch your speed.

Just watch your speed. 54 miles is my record. And I'm no longer going over 45 now. I'm just, I dialed it back. So I'm getting better at my technique and slowing my speed down. Walton, Dornish, and then Nodang says, Pinkas has people that ski for him. Yeah, he just basically hands his watch over.

He's like, get me an extra 10 days. And then wait a second, you were skiing in Aspen and Hokkaido on the same day. He's got ski mules. When the ski mountain closed in Aspen, I got on the Concord, went to Hokkaido, skied and then came back. Exactly. That's actually a Calh. Do you know about this California thing?

They do where you surf in Malibu and then you surf the morning in Malibu and then you drive east to some of those mountains they have. Lake Arrowhead, I think is one or whatever. And then you ski the afternoon, you snowboard the afternoon. You can do it in San Francisco as well. You can do it in San Francisco? How do you do that? Ocean Beach. I have a friend who did it.

Ocean Beach, same day. To Tahoe. 5 a.m. Ocean Beach surf. leave to Tahoe immediately get there at like 10, 11 noon and you ski the rest of the day. I love that idea. I love that idea.

I'm going to take a plan, though. California is so great. You could, in fact, potentially, as I segue to, we live in the future, use one of these devices to ski for you if it came to it. We live in the future. The New York City Fire Department has purchased, oh God, they're on the streets now, two 70-pound robot dogs from Boston Dynamics. You know how you always see those absolutely insane,

terrifying videos of Boston Dynamics robots doing crazy things? Like, you can kick them and they don't fall over. And they can't catch a ball and leap. And now, and you're always like, I hope those don't end up on the streets. Is there a demo video of this? No, they have, yeah.

Here's the demo video. Yeah, we're watching a demo video of it picking up laundry, which frankly, yes, please, I might be willing to spend $75,000 on one of these things. Here it is jumping rope. They cost $75,000. each they are referred to as, quote, spots. The New York City Fire Department will use them.

And this is awesome, actually, to venture into burning buildings and dangerous situations to provide information and aid with search and rescue. They also do, thank God, require a human operator. Look at it. Open a door. Yes. And turn off like a power switch. So if you had like a circuit breaker that was shooting sparks, you could send this thing over to it to turn it off. Totally.

It's awesome. And the fact that, you know, these things have become easy enough to operate and stable enough to be used in the field is absolutely fantastic. It actually really, like, it's fun to watch the videos and be like, they're so scary. But honestly, every day when I look at my stupid worthless rumba, I'm like, why don't we have more robots? We need more robots. I mean, the obvious thing here is to have these capable of going into a building that has, you know, got a lot of smoke, which is really the danger for firefighters. is, you know, in addition to the fire, the smoke, very hard to navigate. Imagine you could send these into a building and with AI not require a human operator.

They just know to look for humans, hear humans, follow the sound, and they could just run into the building and stand over the human and then show the path to the human and show the temperature, the video, and the smoke of that route and then determine through computer visualization and AI, safe for a firefighter to follow that path or not safe. Right. Like Goldilocks. No wait.

Whether the animals? Not the animals. What are the two that go through the forest with the breadcrums? Hansel and Gretax. Hansel and Greta. So you put it into Hansel and Gretel mode. This is what we're good at. It's like branding these things in Braintzell and Bratel mode.

And it leaves a breadcrums and then tells you you should do it or you should not do it. So just great job to Boston Dynamics. And it's so cool. The New York City Fire Department, which is really the greatest fire department in the world. world. I'm a little biased, but congratulations to them on doing something just absolutely incredible here. And I, these things really could, I really love the idea of drones and these fire, these, because I think the fire department should really get drone as well, because indoor drones would do the same thing. Imagine you sent in tiny indoor drones to go into Hansel and

Gretel mode and the dog. So the tiny drones, I'm talking the drones that are the size of like, I don't know, a grapefruit, you know? Imagine you send five of those into a building and they know not to bump into things

and they just, and they're going super fast. They're building in real time. They could build in real time, the floor plan. They could build a 3D floor plan in real time. That could then be sent to the Boston Dynamics dog, which then would follow them.

So then if somebody was passed out from smoke inhalation, you would have the drone on top of them, putting a spotlight, a strobe light on them. You'd have the dog coming. And then why not have the dog, you know, try to wake them up and then drag them out of there. Right. I mean, you just saw the, there's a video of the drone dragging a cinder block that we're

watching now. I mean, there are more than you could trap a toddler strong enough to, well, they could draw, yeah, they could probably drag a human. I mean, you'd have to. Yeah. There's a whole thing about next stability and whatever. But like, it really, this is the future of these really incredibly dangerous jobs and of firefighting.

And it's frankly, great to know that we are finally getting to live in this future because this is, this, these things will unquestionably save lives.

I just had the greatest idea. Why don't they make a water drone? And then when somebody is drowning in the ocean and you can't have lifeguards everywhere, you could set up drones at lifeguard stations. This is something for like Palmer Lucky at Andrew.

And then somebody's in distress and they give like a stress signal or whatever, the drone just boom, Coast Guard drone, out in the water, zips to them and then does some inflation. You put an inflation, all it has to do is reach the person and blow up an inflation device. Totally. And then, you know, put a strobe light on. I mean, we're going, think about the number of lives loss and fires in the water and other scenarios like this. Man, this is why technology is so exciting and people should really build these. And then imagine you do that in a pool. So you like to swim in your pool, it notices that you, I mean, you could do this for an at-home pool.

Eventually, at-home pools will have a drone in them. If you're underwater for more than 60 seconds, the drone gets activated, it shoots over to you, goes underneath you, pops open the flotation device, push you up above the water, and sets an alarm and calls 911 like your Apple Watch does. I mean, where's that? Where's that? That's the easiest one to do it. All the drone has to do is get underneath you, Molly.

Let's quit buying board ape tokens and do that. But the board ape tokens allow you to participate in the economy of primates. For projects. Dear Lord. All right, everybody, we do live in the future. We do. And I love brainstorming these ideas. And if you have great ideas and you want to produce the show with us, we're always looking for associate producers.

Just email producers at this week in startups.com. If you give us an idea for we live in the future or a guest or, a startup of the day or anything and we use it, we're going to send you a gift and give you a shout out on the show. So get active, folks. If you listen to the show,

help us make the show better. Do it, do it. See you next time. All right, everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye bye. Bye. 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, S-A-A-S, 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 and we decide to invest, you'll get 5K in cash or 10% of our carry. Hey, everybody, producer Rachel here. Are you an early stage startup that has product and markets, some traction,

and are looking to raise at least $500,000. Apply today to Remote Demo Day for your chance to pitch to over 9,000 investors in Jason's syndicate. Submit your application at Remote Demoday.com. Our next event is on April 27th. And if you want to learn how to invest in startups from the world's greatest angel investor, and no, we're not talking about Chris Saka, then head to Angel. University to apply. The four-hour workshop costs $300 and all proceeds are donated to charity.

To date, we've donated over $175,000 to various charities, and you can see the full list at angel.university slash charity.