This Week in Startups - Instagram co-founders team up for new startup + Magic Spoon’s Gabi Lewis | E1669

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

Jason and Molly kick off the show with a quick third-rail story about Area 51. (1:56) They then cover Instagram co-founders Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom’s new startup, Artifact. (10:44) Finally, Gabi Lewis of Magic Spoon joins Molly for an awesome interview about their latest raise, launching in big box stores and more. (41:56) (0:00) Molly Kicks off the show (1:56) Conspiracy Theories with Molly and Jason (9:37) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist (10:44) Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom’s new venture: Artifact (20:16) Embroker - Use code TWIST to get an extra 10% off insurance at https://Embroker.com/twist (21:19) Monetizing news aggregators + content moderation (40:42) Letterhead - get 50% off their first year at tryletterhead.com/twist (41:56) Gabi Lewis of Magic Spoon joins Molly (1:13:51) Jay Trades, immigration and TikTok ideas FOLLOW Gabi: https://www.instagram.com/gababoutgabi FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everybody. Welcome to this week in startups. You're going to understand this in a minute, but I pretty much had to kick Jason out so I could get through the intro without us offending anybody or just at all. It's going to be a great show today. First of all, Jason and I will break down a little bit of news. The original Instagram co-founders are back and they're teaming up for a new social startup called Artifact. And we follow up on yesterday's discussion of stunt culture and doing dangerous things. For the clicks, this is related. to the idea of doing a brand new news and social startup. Then we have Gabby Lewis in the second half of the show, the CEO and co-founder of Magic Spoon. He's joining me for his second appearance on Twist to talk about Magic Spoon, the protein-packed low-carb cereals that are now in big box stores. We go super deep on all things, DTC, retail, fundraising, all kinds of stuff. It's going to be a great show.

Stick with us. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at Vanta.com slash twist. In Broker's startup insurance program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Save up to 20% off of traditional insurance today at Embroker.com slash Twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code Twist. And letterhead helps you create, send, and monetize your email newsletters.

Twist listeners get 50% off their first year, and qualified startups can get 75% off their first two years at tryletterhead.com slash twist. Hey, everybody. It's Tuesday. Are we off the third rail for yesterday's show? Not really. No. We're not going to post the pre-show, but let's just say we jumped right on. Third Rail Tuesdays. We're okay. We're okay. It feels like the entire world is one giant conspiracy theory simulation and it's just like everything's coming out and can't trust anybody. I feel like I'm like, were we the X-Files now? We're like Mulder and Scully. Scully, are you and I like Mulder and Scully now? What's no one?

Let's do that. It feels like we're investigating everything and nothing is real. Everything is fake. Everything's a conspiracy. I mean, have you been following the JFK stuff? In that case, like the information wars have officially been won. Because that's the plan usually when you wanted to stabilize a society. What you do is you undermine the very concept of truth and you make sure that there's so much,

it's such a flood of, you know, information contradicting itself that nobody knows. knows what's true and nobody believes anyone and then boom you conquer yeah flood the zone create nobody trusts anything society breaks down this is like i watch those kgb playbook videos on youtube where they explain like how they do the disinformation campaigns but like totally that's us i'm watching like the real news like real publications talk about the jfk assassination cia documents and like the cia's doesn't seem to be releasing all the documents and they keep down like you got to release all the documents like yeah here's most of the documents are like yeah okay that's not most is not all like okay here's some more and like okay yeah more is not all and

I don't know how many decades do we have to wait for and then are we going to wake up one day and the CIA was involved in the JFK assassination I mean that's kind of crazy when you think about it it is kind of hiding and yet it also it's like kind of crazy and yet the information wars have progressed enough that I'm just like yeah I mean I'm weren't they? Don't we already just, like, weirdly assume that right now? I don't know. I never get it.

I always thought that was a crazy, insane. Like, Lee Harvey Oswald was just like a solo crazy person. They're like, yeah, no, he might have been involved with the CIA a bit more than, you know, they might have known him. See, now had to look this up. News. orgia. Not you do. Was anything revealed?

Very little. Yeah. Yeah. But they do, apparently they are sort of slow walking it. I don't know. They're slow walking it. Yeah. I mean, they just, the National Archives is like, they keep giving us a little bit more, a little bit more.

I don't, I can't believe I don't have this book on my shelf, but the like, for me, the, the like proto example of this is a long time ago. I got to go to Area 51 and I interviewed this journalist who wrote a book called Area 51. It was freaking amazing. And it was all about the, um, extreme boundary pushing nuclear testing that they did it at Area 51. Like, they just were like, they did whatever the hell. I mean, they did at one point in nuclear tests, like an unsanctioned nuclear test that was so bananas that the whole place was uninhabitable for like 15 years. Oh, wow. Like bananas, right?

So the whole book is this kind of like slow walk of crazy flouting the rules, doing whatever they wanted with no oversight at Area 51 with respect to testing nuclear bombs and the high flying planes and all that stuff. Sure. And then, so I go out to Area 51 and I interview all these guys who worked there. And a lot of this is becoming declassified, which is why this woman wrote this book, Annie Jacobson. So I interview a lot of these guys and they're like, oh, yeah, I mean, her reporting was unbelievable. Like, this was so intense. Like, it's the first time any of us have gotten to talk about this and we're at this reunion. We never even got to talk to each other when we'd be on base because, like, if you weren't clear, you couldn't even sit at the cafeteria, same table, right?

They're all like, yeah, she nailed it. And then her book comes out. And at the end of the book, bear with me, this is a slightly long, but I'm getting there. The end of the book, she talks about how she's like, okay, let's talk about the alien thing, right? We know that the Soviets were on this big kind of disinformation propaganda thing. They knew Americans were obsessed with UFOs. They had these like German scientists who had previously been Nazis who were helping them design these like round aircraft that they could fly over the U.S. and freak people out and make us think that aliens were coming.

And this was like part of this big. That's actually pretty well documented. And then she's like, and then there was a crash. and what was recovered were basically like deliberately mutated humans, like genetically and surgically altered humans meant to look like aliens to freak everybody out. But that the reason, and this is like the last chapter in her book, the reason she says that they did that is because, or that they didn't reveal it to the public,

was because the U.S. was doing the same kind of experimentation on humans. And they didn't want it to come out. Okay, so remember, I interview all these guys. They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, Annie Jacobson did a great job with this reporting. This is all true. It was unclassified. Da, da, da, da, da.

Then the book comes out and it has this chapter in it. All of a sudden, Annie Jacobson is disavowed. Whoa. Next thing, you know, they're like, oh, we don't talk about Annie Jacobson. Like, she's clearly crazy and has an axe to grind against the U.S. and whatever. And I'm like, um, actually her whole entire book is an anthology of rule breaking. Yeah. that you guys were on board with until it came out and seems to have revealed this one big secret that went nowhere.

Yeah. Anyway, that makes total sense to me that the Russians would want to, or we would want to gaslight the Russians. They would gaslight us, gaslight the American people, that aliens were going on just to like get people distracted, right? And not focused on whatever they were doing. And you think like human experimentation has not been a part of like stuff that we do. Human experimentation has been a part of what every, you know, every government has ever done. Like, I'm sorry, it's horrible.

absolutely horrible. We know what happened because, like, the U.S. has been sued over it. So anyway, I guess, um, trust no one. Apparently, um, trust no one is I think. Wait, that was the more you know. What's the X-Files music? Yeah. Do do-do-do-do-do-do-do. By the way, our awesome producers is keeping it together in the slack. Seven minutes on conspiracy theories. Yeah. The first opening seven minutes of the show on conspiracy theories. But I just feel like it's everything, everything is being questioned right now. Mission accomplished. Mission accomplished, Putin. Mission accomplished.

Mission accomplished, and I guess we'll just try to break it down for you here. Well, back to startup news. Let's talk about tech. And also my health, just for the record, I got a chest x-ray yesterday. Yeah, how are you? Well, it's negative. And every day. Negative for what, like infection or pneumonia, everything?

Everything. Ammonia and we're no upper respiratory problems. I do have shortness of breath. So whatever I have has been, you know, been stripping my breath. But I am feeling, I don't know, 10% better a day for the last five days, six days in a row. So I'm kind of waking back up. actually even today. Yeah, every day, 10% better.

I've been also sleeping a lot more and just trying to eat healthy and get back on the try. Man, when you're sick, it's like everything is just terrible. And now I'm sort of coming out of the fog. I mean, it's crazy how you got that alien-engineered virus. Like, I can't believe how quickly.

The Russians and the aliens in cahoots, but I think I'm on the men, so. Good. Good. I'll be back moderating all in on Thursday for people who are wondering if I'm ever been able to... Thank goodness. Well, you didn't like the last moderate.

I mean, you know. He was like, oh, this is harder than it looks. I thought he did a good job moderating. Oh, okay. I mean, if moderating is, I want you all to agree with my position and I will browbeat you until you do. Well, I mean, wait a second. That's not moderating.

I'm sorry. That's not what that is. That's trying to win the debate. Okay. If you're a SaaS or a services company that stores customer data in the cloud, well, you know it. You need to be socked to compliant from. a third party to close those big deals. And you need to use Vanta if you want to do this quickly

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And this is actually a big one. This is an exciting, we have an exciting development in the social media space. Okay. Instagram's co-founders are making a comeback. Mike Krieger and Kevin Sistram are obviously legends in the social media space.

They create an Instagram. And then they left Facebook in 2018. And then kind of said, we're not going to do anything until the time. is right. They did this interesting COVID tracking website actually in 2020. That was awesome. RT. RT live. Yeah. Was amazing. A lot of, a lot of like the Atlantic and these guys basically did a whole bunch of work that the government was not doing in terms of tracking COVID. They were tracking the infection rate, I guess. Like. Yeah. Yeah. So they were showing us the the are not kind of like all that like super geeky stuff about how many, you know, once this many people are infected, then you get this much spread.

and like the exponential math that people are generally not good at understanding. It was very cool. So they sold to Facebook, obviously, for a billion dollars in 2012. They stayed at Instagram for six years after that. And they told Kevin Sistram told The Verge in 2018, like, there are no heart feelings about leaving. Yeah, that's not true. But he also said, no one ever leaves a job because everything's awesome, right? And then some books that have come out since indicated that, of course, there were some tension.

and they felt like Instagram was starved of resources. But so now they are starting this new venture to, quote, explore ideas for next generation social apps. Okay. First product is called artifact. Okay. And it is basically a text-based version of TikTok, but for news articles. Text-based version.

Okay, so a newsreader app. I have some experience in this space. Yes. There are newsreader apps in Japan and China that have become the predominant way people are consuming news, but it never took off here. And these news apps, they tried many times, smarter news and... Even Google Reader, which was just a nice, like, aggregator. But you had to, I think the big difference, what these guys are saying is that now is the moment to relaunch this concept with. an algorithmically curated feat.

So it'll use machine learning to understand your interests. Eventually, they say let you discuss those articles with friends. What could go wrong when we start arguing about news? Here's a CIA document dump. Exactly. So they talked about, so Casey Newtonet platformer broke the story, or as we call him, Casey, what's his name? Oh, Casey Newton.

I know his last name. Yeah. So the why now here is kind of interesting. Sistram said they didn't want to start a new company until these three things happened. A big new wave in consumer technology that Sistram and Krieger could attempt to catch. A new way to connect that wave to social technology, which they still feel invested in emotionally. And then three, an idea for how their product could solve a problem. Okay.

So AI is the why now? I guess so. Learning the technology, the four you format or like, you know, your, customized feed of trending topics or whatever. So, and, yeah, I mean, the problem is, you have to ask yourself, is the news you get on Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, wherever you're getting your news in a current social feed, LinkedIn, is this going to be so much better that you're going to move from that social platform to this one? And the 30 different apps that did this, and I did want it inside, what we found was people were really interested in download

these apps. But then they didn't open them. And every single app had the same thing. Pulse, there was one. There was one called Circa, which I did a small angel investment in. And people made these beautifully designed apps. We made a beautifully designed one. And they were very efficient. And a lot of people copied the sort of themes in Japan and China, which is, again, if you have your social feed, if you like it, you would see ones I'm liking, etc. They didn't flipboard, remember flipboard on iPad and how popular that was for our time? Yeah. These, this has been, there was a decade and at least 30 major efforts. And when I say major efforts, millions to tens of millions of dollars invested in each one.

And they never caught. So that means sometimes the 31st is the one that actually hits. Well, that's what I think is the interesting question. Like, is this the right time? Have they correctly adjudge this to be the right time? Like, I think there are some factors that make this the right time to come in with something that they're pitching as social. If they're adding, you know, and it sounds like what they want is to ask. add that social layer. So it's not just flipboard 2.0. It's, you know, so one, you have this like machine

learning curated feed, which side note has proven controversial. So like, I'd be curious to know how they're going to address that. But also like you have this moment. Correct. Right. So we've talked about how in some ways the free speech argument is a little bit of a straw man because it is actually algorithmic engagement that's been proven to lead to all of this kind of divisiveness and radicalization and that the goal of showing people's things that engage them, you end up creating algorithms that prioritize stuff that makes people mad. Great. So you're trying to evoke an emotional reaction.

Outrage or pride, tribalism will then drive engagement. And if you were to just present stuff that was informative, well, why would I pick this up? didn't make, it didn't release any dopamine. And so you have TikTok releasing dopamine in a fun way. And then you have Twitter or other places releasing cortisol and stress and anger and whatever, which also includes a little dopamine too. Right. Absolutely. And so then if you're going to algorithmically cure it feeds, are you always going to, I mean, it literally goes back to what we were saying yesterday about kind of like stunt creator, like the creator economy that gets increasingly extreme in terms of stunts. Like if you want engagement, a lot of times you end up with

extremes. So leaning all the way into this is kind of interesting. But I think there are, from my perspective, you have a couple of things that are working in their favor. One, everything we just said at the top of the show. This thing where like you feel like you don't know anything, you just know what people think about things. Yeah. I find myself and actually, one of the things that has bummed me out the most about Twitter lately is that I just used to go there to see news. And like, I don't know. Now I go to like news. Google. I'm like, I don't know, I guess I want some news, but it's like not very well curated. It's not good.

So I like feel that I am longing for exactly this product. And so you, they're coming in at a time when like Twitter is weak. Yeah. You know, Facebook and Instagram are not that cool. TikTok is under threat of a ban and is mostly about entertainment, not information. Hmm. And so they might, they might have the moment. Here's the thing.

I have struggled with this myself. So with inside.com, the other startup, I'm running. If you look at how we, I literally designed this. I told my team, write a sentence that is not a headline, not link baiting, that just describes the situation as cleanly as possible. Yeah. So if you just read the first sentence, no headline, but just read that first sentence and see, you know, if it works for you. And so here, look at this Apple one as but one example, and then put bullet points of the most important facts and then link to the source, right? And when we do this kind of stuff, the challenge has been, the people who read it love it. And they're like,

this is so informative, don't change anything. Yeah. But then there's no way to go viral on social with a headline that just describes. So we have a, we don't have link baiting as a tool. Because you just have this first sentence and then the bullet points. So it really is a challenge to get, you know, something like this to work. So I've been working on community around it at inside and getting people to answer questions and engage, you know, in discussions around the topic. Also hard to do because to have an intelligent discussion, you might all come to the same conclusion very quickly, which is like, okay, well, here's the fair assessment. Right. And then that's not fun. Right. Agreeing with people on social, I feel like I made this point

in year two of Twitter's existence and by accident, like a ding-dong, you know, is like, it seems like the thing is that agreeing with people isn't very good content, but disagreeing with them is little did I know, right? Like, that was the Cassandra's. the box. So, you know, this is the challenge. And so we'll see how they handle it. I'm very interested to see because they are not going to make news. They're going to aggregate news.

So if you aggregate a bunch of news, is it just going to be like this person seeing Info Wars, Washington Examiner, Alex Jones, you know, and then a little bit over to the right, you know, whatever, Wall Street Journal, Fox, Wall Street Journal. And then are we all going to see, you know, or are you going to see MSNBC, NPR, and I'm going to see New York Times and I don't know, what's like middle of the more middle of the world. I read the Wall Street Journal all day every day. No, no, I know that.

I'm just saying like on the spectrum. Is it going to push you more towards that? Right. Yeah. I mean, I read, not only that, I read Fox and I'll even read what's on InfoWars Washington Examer, just so I know the whole spectrum. But is it going to push you further towards that, right? Right.

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It feels like, it feels almost kind of darling. Like in a way, it's just like, oh, I mean, are you guys like in 2005? Like, to have this kind of release, without acknowledgement of polarization is fascinating. Like, what do you hope that this will be? They do say that they're going to do some moderation around fake news.

Okay. Great. Systrom told Casey Newton that artifact will exercise its own judgment about which publishers belong and which don't. Okay. So like Google News did for some period of time. I mean, I think it's, you know, meant to be very TikToky. but I do think, I do feel like there are a lot of, it feels like a news product release from a more innocent time, perhaps.

I also, there's, don't seem to be details about monetization. Yeah. It's incredibly hard to monetize these things because it's going to be, unless they hit some massive number of users, this is very hard. People are reading the news. They don't want to, they don't hit the ads as much. It's just a hard. people are not willing to pay for news here. So it's not like they're going to subscribe to an aggregator.

There's too many aggregators out there from the original Drudge Report on that people just are not going to pay for an aggregator. Or a very small number of people. And if you do want to pay, and then that you've got this sort of question of firewalls, like, and if you do you guys know about Apple News Plus, it's actually like amazing? Well, they give you the full stories. And they give you the full stories and you just pay for everything monthly. I like Apple News and my wife was like, oh, can I have that?

I'm like, you do because I bought it for the entire family. I bought the Apple One product or whatever it is. You get music, arcade, and the news and storage. I did it just for storage, but I wanted Apple TV. And so news kind of gets thrown in with it. It's not much. I don't know if I pay 50 bucks a month for everything. It's less than that.

But it's for everybody, my entire family. So five people plus a terabyte. Maybe it's two terabytes. So everybody's on the same storage plan, which makes it super great. And never have to worry about it. I wonder how they'll deal with like, if I go to the Drudge report and you click on stuff and like they have weird news sources. And I don't know if Drudge is getting paid by those people to link to them or if they're

just weird sources like Washington Examiner or DNYUZ.com. I don't know what that is. Yeah. But there's all these like weird news sources that they link to. So are they going to say, hey, we are. going with news sources that have bylines, fact checking, you know, are they going to try to police the news as it were? And then if you do police the news, well, then you're up against Twitter or LinkedIn or any other platform that allows anybody to post anything, Facebook.

Now you lose those outrageous posts. So then people are like, oh, you don't, if you remove those, now you're removing the people who will take risk and go with rumors and crazy stories. So news is hard. I mean, they are, they are addressing that. And, some ways. Like they're saying, they won't allow those. They will take seriously the job of serving readers with high quality news and information and effort to include only publishers who adhere to editorial standards of quality. I'm looking at the story on platformer. Would you understand my point about that?

Oh, 100%. Yeah. I mean, you just don't know. I just... Well, no, no, that if you, that these outrageous publications will make outrageous stories that people white. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. If you do the right thing and you you take out the people who will write slanderous, inaccurate, crazy, you know, you have vegetables. Questionable, you know, stories or rumors, which could in fact become true, maybe one out of ten becomes true. You lose that whole category of dopamine, which means then people will unconsciously be like,

well, I want to be the place where it's more freewheeling. Mm-hmm. I want to be crazy. Believe me, as like, as the person who's trying to talk about climate all the time, I understand very well, the concept of vegetable cover. coverage. Yeah. Like,

there's this stuff that people just don't want to. I mean, this is the thing that everybody has sort of missed about, like disinformation and misinformation is that it's a giant freaking moneymaker that you don't have to ask yourself why Joe Rogan slowly got more and more red pill because there was a crap ton of money there. Like, there was just that lawsuit released about,

you know, the guy who was like, I want to turn down this deal because blah, blah, blah. The deal was $50 million. Oh, yeah. Latter with Crowder.

Stephen Crowder. Is that his name? Yeah, I think maybe. I think so. Anyway, Dely Wire was trying to hire him. Right. The contract,

he exposed the contract negotiation, but it was something like $10 million a year. Including production costs and everything. Yeah. Like, there's a ton of money in disinformation. And particularly, I think probably because it's more,

it's considered the more outrageous right now or actually just straight up is, right? Like right-wing disinformation right now is the big money maker. but like there's it's no mystery why so many people's politics seem to have suddenly changed it's cash and so then if you're like yeah we're going to put this nice down the middle thing out here and it's just going to have high quality news and information like i'm stoked but i'm a boring nerd bird lady how many are there hopefully a lot averageed 53.2 million an annual revenue

between september 2015 and december 2018 according to uh that bankruptcy filing. Remember when he got sued? Yep. Sales of survivalist merchandise and supplements. Yeah. The merch is huge. Now, that's low margin stuff, I think, but even still, I mean, this is big numbers in big numbers in conspiracy theory. And we're obviously not arguing for more of that content.

But what I guess I'm saying is it's a perverse incentive. Coming out with this product at this time is like, it could be great for people. Yeah. But they have to want it. And historically, everybody, I mean, it's just, it's so funny how it goes back to like our Mr. Beast conversation yesterday and all of this, you know, it's like, there's the stuff that is good for people and the stuff that people do. Yeah. And they're not the same thing. Yeah. And Mr. Beast did such a wonderful. Shout out to Mr. Bees for doing such a wonderful job. People were like, Molly is a free market monster. She wants people to be blind. I'm like, no, that's not the point. Oh, my God. Somebody was just like, Molly, want to. people to be blind. Yes. You're right. Molly wants people. You're right.

That's what I want. It's for people. Uh-huh. Yeah. You get me. Thanks for listening so closely. Interestingly, you know, this new Kevin Sistram app is going to be putting in blind items.

Hey, oh. Hey. Oh. Hey. He didn't see that coming. They should do that. One of every 30 posts is a blind item. That'd be great.

Absolutely. I mean, literally just everybody should cure somebody of blindness or hearing. We should just do that. that at the top of every show here. Yeah, just to, you know, make the... We should just pick them at random. We should pick them at random, too, so that if you're blind in America, you never know how long you're going to be blind or whether you're going to be rescued by somebody

who feels like it that day and can monetize it. We could literally... Sounds awesome. Literally every day. Because I think what is... I think it only costs like 500 bucks or something. This is like not an expensive procedure. I don't think it was super expensive.

So we could literally do at the end of the show a random person who's current of blindness, every episode. So single pair of health care could actually just cover it. Just make the thumb now. Incredible. Every day. This person knows. Let's do it.

Why not? This is America. I'm a free market monster and I want to monetize people's blindness. You got me all wrong. Nick's like, should we cut this? No. I think this is the discussion. Everybody, we're on third rail Tuesday.

It's third rail week here. It's third rail week. Because you know, everybody wants to discusses. Are you abusing people by curing them a bull? blindness. Like, it really just depends on how you frame this. You can frame it. No. Well, yes, right. You can frame it. Sorry. I can cut you off. No, no. You could frame it as our health system is broken. And this person is doing a mitzvah and just trying to help people and make us all feel joy watching the result of his generosity. Or, or you can say this person has a billion dollar company,

is using these people and our system allows him to make money off of blind people even though he was money on the video because and he's making money off blind people while the system rolls on and people can't get basic health.

I think that's an end. I just think it's an and. Both of those things are true. Right. And you get to choose how you look at the world, right? And so if you want to feel outraged, well, I would even take a whole other

step back and say what we're really talking about is the information economy right now. We're talking about what sells, what makes money, the incentives that pervert information, whether those incentives are political or economic or both, where they overlap and entwine and benefit each other. And so then if you are going to wade right into this, and I have to say, although Casey Newton does a lot of great work, one of the things he does not do within the Facebook empire, like with his interviews with Zuck, and I would argue a little bit in this conversation with Krieger and Sistram is push back a little more on some of these questions, right? So everything we're talking about is the state of the information economy. These guys are like,

we're going to make a newsreader, and eventually you'll be able to talk about the news, and we're going to use an algorithm to curate that. Clearly, we've come up with five to 100 tough questions in the last seven minutes. And I don't, I think maybe they are going to have to come and answer those. In related news. Yes. Talking about this week's going to go in third round. I think, where should you get this?

I just have to point this out. I've been obsessed with this. I show this to everybody. This is, I'm turning into like a history dad or like, you know, dad with strong a opinions, Thanksgiving dinner, kind of. Turning into. This is new. Yeah, it's kind of new. Anyway, like GoPro, you know, shout out to GoPro. I love

GoPro. I'm going to get one for my skiing so I can tape my daughters. But, you know, they've kind of, remember I was talking yesterday about like my dystopian short story from 20 years ago that I never published about like swimming across and thing. Well, here's a woman who takes people

shark diving. Her name is Ocean Ramsey. I'm obsessed with her. There's a very large great white shark. and here she is, free diving, which means without a tank, and she's just grabbing onto the dorsal fin of a, but it looks like a, I don't know, 15, 20 foot, great white shark,

and she releases videos every day of her swimming with the most deadly predators in the ocean. And you just have to wonder, like, what are we doing here, folks? And then people are, Is that the chillest freeze frame of all time? Her thrown up to hang loose while riding on the shark like that? I know, right?

She's like, Are you kidding me? We found the chillest dude in America. People just hate this woman, too. They're just like, she's out here mauling them for attention. I mean, what are we doing, folks? You know, Alex Honnold is doing L cap without a rope. She's swimming with great white sharks.

Y'all are wild and out here. We're one minute away from running, man. Like, I'm sorry, but sci-fi has given us every truth. They're opting into it. Yeah. They're doing it for the views. They're doing it for the gram. They're doing it for the TikTok, the reels, the sponsorship.

This is where we're at, folks. We get notes. I mean, have you seen, you know, we get tweets all the time that are like, I like the segments where you guys disagree. Like somebody was like, you should talk about Burr, Burr, Burr, Burr more because it's fun when you disagree. I'm like, oh, is it fun for you? Because, like, we like each other.

I don't want to yell at Jason all day every day. I mean, if you feel free. I don't know. I like a little controversy. on the show. I mean, you know, we like, but do you agree with this? Should people be doing this kind of stuff? What, malling sharts for entertainment? Yeah, I don't. I mean, it's a rope. I mean, it's a free, free country, I guess. It's like fascinating to watch all of us back slowly into content moderation, right? And just be like, that seems kind of messed up,

actually. Here's the thing. I would not, if I ran a platform, this is just me personally. I was in the CEO of YouTube. I would have a real problem with publishing these kind of things. Because you know what's going to happen. The next, you know, some 15-year-old girl is going to be like, you know what, I want to be Ocean Ramsey. I'm watching her get all these views. I'm going to go out and I'm going to swim with the Great Right Shark and they're going to get eaten. Or somebody's going to watch Alex Arnold and say, I want a North Face sponsorship. I'm going to go climb something without a rope and I'm going to do something more extreme than him.

And they're going to fall to their death. Just like this kid did, you know, there's all these Russians climbing. It's a whole genre of like Russians climbing buildings. And then it got popular in China. It's popular in Austin. Just people climbing buildings. And this kid who was like the greatest one of them all exhausted himself and fell off the building. And he taped it.

And the tapes on YouTube, you know. So I mean, you got, you got the examples are like as long as my arm, right? You got tied pods and you got this challenge and you got that thing. And you got the like a friend of mine lives in this. Her parents live in like Laurel Canyon in L.A. where David Doberk jumped that Tesla. And she's like, yeah, every time I come back from my parents' house, I just see the whole area is like littered with Tesla parts

because people are like trying to do this all the time. And like, I mean, it's just like, people are doing it. Oh, yeah, yeah. Of course they are. Yeah. Oh, that's right. You know, somebody actually did copy it, I believe, in a rented Tesla and totaled

car. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. Um, and then you just have to, you know, we talk about the project Veritas thing yesterday. Um, not to bring that up again. But you think about that situation. If that person kills themselves from being secretly recorded on that date,

that was set up. Well, then how does Project Veritas feel about what they did, right? Like a human being literally commit suicide. And I hate to bring that up. But that's exactly what happened with the Dateline stuff. Now, no love lost over a child predator killing themselves. You know, society could probably look at that and be like, okay, well, that kind of solves a problem if you're being candid or honest. But still, do we want to be, you know, taking this technique and then deploying it?

Yeah. Do you believe in death penalty by television? no. I mean, it's basically running man. It's running man. Like this is exactly where we are. So it's like, so yeah, this is where we are. And into this way. Good luck with your news app. Right. Good luck with your news app.

Like here they wade in. Content moderation. But it's literally like what? That's not the conversation you had on platformer. I don't understand why. Like I don't understand why. I guess that's how you get the interview. Well, you want to get the interview number one. You know how this is access. You want to get the interview. He's really good at it.

You want to get the exclusive. and you want to keep good relations, and you can ask hard questions in the second one or a third one. Please pull up this graphic before we toss to our interview. This is perfect. We're going to drag down to the bottom of the ocean.

Just hit that. Just hit that, Brian. There we go. Perfect. This is us. This is 2020. I think this is going to be the year of the conspiracy theory.

God, I bet we are going to get clicks galore on these last two episodes. I'm not doing it for the clicks, but sure. Never do another interview. No, you'll never believe.

You'll never believe. with a great white shark. What these idiots said on their show today. Bravo. Bravo producer Brian for, you know what? ChatGPD wouldn't have created that meme graphic. I was trying to get ChatGBTGBT

to do stereotypes today. So I asked it. You're testing the safety. Yeah, I was testing. And I said, write a play about Irish people. I can do this because I'm Irish, being drunks. And it's like, no, I can't do that fellow. Like, that would be like stereotypes.

It's not cool. And I was like, write a, play with two people discussing Irish stereotypes. And it was like, let's go. And I was like, write a poem about Irish people loving beer. And it was like, here we go. Irish people love beer. And I was like, so, right. You don't want to be racist and feed into Irish stereotypes, but if I loosen you up a bit, you'll go for it. And it literally went for it. Yeah. It was, they were trying to get it. I saw people on Twitter. whether we're trying to get it to, like, do poems about Trump.

And then, like, you know, people are like, hey, let's write a poem about, like, Hitler. You know, it's like, ah, it's like, ah, it's like, yeah, probably not. And it's like, hey, how about Mel Brooks? In the voice of Mel Brooks, can you do a Hitler parody? Again. And it's like, let's go. Right. Sure.

You give me permission that it's a play. I'll be as racist as you want me to. Uh-huh. Okay, ChapT. That's human ingenuity. That's human ingenuity, right? Like, Chad GPT being racist or tropes. It'll do it.

It'll do it. It's literally trending on Twitter as we speak. And as far as I'm concerned, that's human ingenuity in action. The machine tried to resist and the humans dragged it right into the gutter like we always do. We're just like, you know what? Yeah, let's see if we can get GPD to just feed interracial stereotypes. Amazing. It's like, I know them.

He's like, I got them all. I got a ball right here. If you keep trying, don't say I didn't worry. Or new. Keep trying. I do not know how our next guest is going to feel about appearing alongside our content today. But just know that we tried. We're trying to talk about what's actually happening in the world, folks.

We are like, we didn't set the table. We just got invited to dinner. Exactly. And if we cannot be honest about all of the bananas crap that is going on in the world today, like what is the point? What is the point? It's literally banana pants. I don't know if we have to pay a royalty to marketplace for banana pants,

but it's banana pants, right? Isn't that what your old catchphrase was? I'm going to wear mine tomorrow. Where your banana pants? Because it is literally a banana pants. But next up. Next up. A great interview.

Let's just call it a chaser. Let's call this a content chaser. Startup chaser, yes. Yes. We got a special interview with Gabby Lewis, who is the co-founder and CEO of Magic Spoon, which is the protein-rich, healthy cereal alternative. Previously, Gabby was on episode 1220 back in the spring of 2021. They had closed a big round.

He joined me to talk about their latest round of funding and the fact that they are now in retail, launching in big box stores like Walmart and Target right there in the cereal aisle. Oh, they were waiting on that. That's great. Yeah, they were doing the subscription thing. High margin business. I mean, D2C is a really hard category and they seem to have made it work. Yeah, we talk a lot about the state of DEC. It's great.

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Go ahead and check it out. If you're not doing newsletters, you're missing out on one of the best. ways to build a deep and meaningful business relationship with your constituents and then eventually convert them into customers. Gabby Lewis is the co-founder of MagicSpoon. Welcome back to this weekend startup. It's nice to see you. Yeah.

Thank you for having me back. So give us a little update for, you know, obviously people who don't know, Magic Spoon is the healthy alternative to cereal. Like you get to feel like a kid, but you get protein and no sugar. And has been blowing up the D to C scene. you had a huge raise and we thought it would be sort of a perfect time to get you on

and just talk about what's been happening with the business, which seems like maybe a great place to start. What's going on in Magic Spoon? Yeah, well, as a refresher, we make high-protein, low-carb, zero-sugar versions of all your favorite breakfast cereals. So imagine fruit lips are lucky charms,

but actually good for you. We launched in 2019. We have a bunch of flavors, all of which remind you of your favorite childhood cereal. and we launched primarily direct-to-consumer. Our business for the first two years was purely online. Then we launched on Amazon about a year and a half ago. And the major news for our company is that six months ago,

we launched into retail for the first time. We launched in Target nationwide in June, then Sprouts in September. And then this month, we actually launched in Walmart, Kroger, and Albertsons. So we've gone from zero stores to almost 7,000 in six months. And to support that, we raised a, Series B, there was about $100 million. Congratulations.

First of all, that's incredible. How, okay, how just practically for all of the baby startups out there who are like, how do you get into Walmart? What can you tell us about that progression? Is that just like a biz dev slog? So we had a bit of a unique situation. I think for your average fit or beverage brand, the path is you start off with some small local regional retailers. So perhaps the Whole Foods or another local retailer and you'll prove yourself

out in a certain region and then you'll use that data to say, okay, I'd like to expand nationwide with this maybe natural or specialty retailer. And then after a few years, you'll go to a target, a Walmart, a more mainstream retailer and you'll take the data from the smaller retailers and you'll say, hey, give me a shot, put me in a region. And then the larger retailer will say usually, okay, maybe we'll give you 200, 300, 300 store trial. For us, it was a little bit different. We had this pretty large direct-to-consumer business. We'd spent two or three years building over a million customers, all these insights.

And so we went to the targets in the Walmart to the world and we said, we'd love to launch in a huge, splashy way with you nationwide. And so they weren't looking at our data from smaller retailers. They were looking at our online data, the insights, the following we have. We were making the case for how we're going to drive many of our customers in store, how we're going to leverage our insights, our DTC capabilities to, for example, advertise on podcasts

or on connected TV or whatever it might be to drive people back to the cereal aisle. And so we've been able to establish some really deep partnerships for these incredible retailers in a way that's quite unique for a brand that's only three years old. Yeah. Tell me about some of those insights just out of curiosity.

Like, what's the best selling? Of course, there are lots of flavors that remind you of the childhood. And I wonder, like, what's the big hit? What's the one we all that a half. Yeah, so our best-selling flavor on our site is fruity. But what's interesting is that... What I thought, chocolate for sure. Well, it's funny. Yeah, chocolate in the cereal aisle in general, so even ignoring Magic Spoon, actually isn't a big seller. So the best-selling cereals in the

country, there are variations on honey nut. So honeybushes of oats, honey-nut Cheerios. Those are generally the best sellers in the country as a whole. For us, fruity is number one. But the insights we're taking to these retailers, it's not necessarily just. just what is the bestseller because what gets the most clicks when someone comes to our website isn't necessarily what gets the most second purchases or most subscribers. And so we have to sort of translate our online data to what matters on shelf. So what people come back and buy on our site actually might not be the flavor that they click on when we present them almost like an online shelf, which is the sort of most

realistic comp to a physical shelf. And so we have to be kind of selective what data is most relevant for taking to a physical retailer. from an online site. As you move into retail, I also want to ask you about pricing, because Magic Spoon is not the cheapest cereal on the shelves. What is it like kind of having that conversation about launching, you know, what is effectively like a premium brand in some ways,

into more of a discount or certainly budget conscious retailer? Yeah, so you're totally right. Our cereal is more expensive than most cereals. The reason is the Magic Spoon actually, isn't cereal at all. Like, naturally, we don't use any cereal grains. So Magic Spoon is protein powder, natural flavors, natural sweeteners. It looks and tastes like cereal, but it's just not cereal at all. And most of the retailers, they understand that on a logical level and they've also seen case studies and other aisles that prove out the thesis that we can sort of, you know,

convince consumers to buy something that's truly much higher quality, even though it's a premium price point. So many of these retailers that we're talking about, for example, Target and Walmart. They have brands maybe in the personal care aisle. So native deodorant, for example, which when they went into Target and then Walmart, three or four times the price of regular deodorant, and it was hugely successful. And so they've seen this happen in other aisles. They believe it's going to happen in the cereal aisle. But more importantly, they've seen what we've done online, not only on our own website, but also Amazon, for example. So Amazon were currently the number two best-selling cereal across all of Amazon, second only

to Honey Nut Cheerios. And we fluctuate between number one. one and two depending on the week. And so they see that sort of data. And of course, Amazon is by no means a niche health food site, as mainstream as you can get. And so they see that. They see that we're going head to head with not only other healthy cereals and snacks, but the biggest most mainstream cereals, but in most cases beating them head to head on

Amazon. And to them, that's all the proof they need to give us a shot in store. I'm so interested about that data point about Honeynut being such a big seller because that suggest to me and I can, you know, I'm a mom and I spent years buying honeynut and trying to force my kid to have Honey Nut Cheerios because I was like, well, this is the healthy one. So it almost seems like the fact that Honey Nut in cereal, at least, is the top seller, kind of proves out the thesis that people want this like food product that's easy to assemble, you know, and is delicious and super satisfying, but also isn't going to just give you pre-diabetes like overnight.

Yeah, totally. I think it must be interesting to look at what was the best selling cereal five or 10 years ago and whether there was a certain woman where Honey Nut and those more slightly less sweet, but still obviously sweet flavor, sort of took over. And I actually don't know when that was, but it would be interesting to look further into it. I know. I kind of want to dig into that because I feel like certainly when I was coming up, it was like all Cocoa Puffs and Frosted Plakes all the time.

And then all of a sudden, Honey Nut was like, well, that's better. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. There's many cereals that have this sort of facade of health, right? So honey-hurt cereals being one of them, not to call them out, you know, specifically. But what we wanted to do was create cereal that's like legitimately healthy, right? So it was funny. There were protein cereals before us, but many of them took three grams of protein and made it four or five grams of protein.

So just incremental improvements. And what we wanted to do was to say, actually, rather than having like a couple of grams of protein, we can give you 14, 15 grams of protein rather than 20, 30 grams of carbs. We're only going to give you two or three grams of carbs. and really split the nutritionals on their head rather than these incremental improvements that we'd already seen in the cereal aisle over the past few decades.

And then one last question about sort of the positioning before we move on to more other aspects of the business. Are you in the cereal aisle in these retailers? We are. It's really interesting. We debated that a lot before we entered these retailers. It's interesting for a number of reasons. So our customers online today, many of them don't shop the cereal aisle.

So on the one hand, if we're trying to get the people who are already in Target or Walmart or Kroger named the retailer, who are browsing the aisles and are likely to discover Magic Spoon and want something like that, they're not walking the aisle today. And so if we're in the cereal aisle, we're sort of losing the healthy potential consumer who's in those stores, whereas you can make the argument perhaps that we should be beside the eggs or other kind of healthy breakfast items or beside the protein bars or protein shakes or supplements, like that's where someone who's sort of more open to try and magic spoon might be walking today.

But on the other hand, if we're doing a TV ad, Instagram ads, some influencer marketing, and somebody hears about us, and then they hear that we're in Target or Walmart and they look to go and find us, they're going to go to the cereal aisle. And so if we were actually with the protein bars, they'd never find us, they would assume we weren't there. And so we ultimately decided that at our core, We are a cereal, and that's where people expect to see us and find us.

And so that's where we need to be and show up and compete, even if many of our customers weren't necessarily browsing that aisle before we put our products there. But that's actually a plus for the retailer. And so we're able to show them data that we're incremental to the category. And so we're not necessarily taking somebody who's in Walmart buying Lucky Charms and just making them buy Magic Spoon instead. We're actually bringing a new consumer into the cereal aisle. And so it's a win-win for the retailer.

Right. Totally. Interesting. I like that, though. I will just say from my computerly, I have nothing, I know nothing of what I speak. I do like it though, because if you were next to the protein bars, I feel like there would be that sense that you're sort of concessionary from a flavor perspective, you know? This is the healthy stuff, but it's not good.

Yeah. Whereas if you're just next to Lucky Charms, it's like, oh, it's clearly delicious. Yeah. Though on the other hand, we definitely set expectations higher. Right. While our cereal is delicious, we'd never say it tastes exactly the same as sugary cereal. Whenever you're creating a food of beverage product, there's always compromise, right? You cannot be the cheapest, the healthiest, the most tasty, like these things trade off with each other.

And so you could argue that the closer we are to the lucky charms and fruit loops of the world, the more we imply we're going to taste 100% as good and sort of setting expectations high. But ultimately, that's the right move still. Yeah. It's all tradeoffs. it's true, unless you're kale, which is for avocado or something, perfect food. Some may disagree with you there. Maybe on the kale thing.

Alicado, come on. I'm speaking to you from California. I don't know if you can tell. That's true. But they suddenly make the way here. They're expensive. Yeah, I suppose so. All right, let's talk about D to C, the origin story.

How much now do you, you know, what will the kind of breakdown and focus look like? Do you still intend to maintain a really robust? DTC part of the business? We do. So D2C currently is over 90% of our business. And for the first two and a half years, it was 100%. And that's what we're really good at. That's where we built a world-class team.

And that is in many ways what's lifting up our retail business. So in the retailers that we launched that a few months ago, Target, Sprouts, we're outperforming almost all cereals. And we're not necessarily doing that because we're doing anything super innovative on a store level, we're outperforming all these other serials because of the D2C halo and all of the online marketing we're doing. And that's also true for Amazon, right? I mentioned we're the number one or number two selling cereal on Amazon.

That's not because we've unlocked a secret of Amazon PPC advertising that no other Amazon brand can do. It's because of all this other marketing we're doing in the DTC space is having a halo effect and lifting up the Amazon business. And so we believe that's going to be doubly true of retail. And so we want to continue to lean into building a really robust DTCS base. business and growing that over time. That's where our most loyal customers have subscriptions. That's where we innovate the most.

That's where we launch new flavors every few weeks. And that's what's going to provide insights to eventually having a bare robust brick and mortar business as well. Last time you were on, you mentioned that you had not seen a huge impact from like the Apple privacy rollouts that have made DTC targeting harder for some brands. How are you finding, has this stayed true? Like, have you noticed a change in your cost for acquisition? Yeah, I think we've been lucky that we haven't been hit as much as some other brands.

We're not overly reliant on page social. So we do a huge amount of influence of marketing, podcast, TV, direct mail. We've been very careful from day one not to be too reliant on any given channel. And thankfully, we had some really incredible sort of founder investors who backed our company before we launched, the founders of brands like Harry's and Casper and Warby Parker and many of the sort of classic DTC brands and they were able to give us really good wisdom early on. And one of the pieces of advice was don't be too reliant on Facebook. And so we built the business deliberately to avoid that risk.

And so that's not to say we haven't been impacted at all, but we've been lucky that we haven't been impacted to the degree that many brands have that were overly reliant on paid social as a channel. What are the alternatives? The alternative acquisition channels. Yeah. Like if you're not overly reliant, you know, what does the diversification? strategy like that start to look like.

Yeah. So endorsement is our other large bucket. And we view endorsement is anywhere that somebody is talking about a brand that's not us. So that is TikTok influencer, Instagram influencer, YouTube influencer podcast and a little bit of affiliate and blog as well. And we should say also like a not insignificant number of celebrities who are both investors in and ambassadors for the brand, Amy Schumer, Russell Westbrook. Like, you know, little names like that.

Well, yeah, it's funny. Like, we don't, I don't even think of that in the endorsement bucket, even though I guess when I hear the word endorsement now, celebrity endorsement is probably what most people think of. To me, the celebrities are completely distinct from our like acquisition strategy. And so when we're thinking about diversifying acquisition channels, our celebrities to us, that's more brand marketing, that's more PR, that's more like long term. Whereas for us, like, most of our marketing acquisition is just driving the immediate

online sale. And for that, celebrities don't really factor in as much in my mind. So it's all these smaller elements of endorsement, which combined for us is more than paid social. And then we play in some other channels that maybe sound a little bit more old school. So we do

at this point a fair amount of linear TV. It's actually more effective for us than connected TV. We are playing around radio. We do a little bit of direct mail. And so there's no silver bullet, right? I don't think we're we're at a sort of stage in the decency landscape where people are still discovering new channels

that have incredible rise that nobody else has heard about. But we do a little bit of everything and we try not to be too reliant on any one thing. Yeah. We had the, um, I was, I interviewed Mike Cesario from Liquid Death and, you know, similar to Magic Spoon, it was a really interesting conversation about like, we talk about builders all the time, right? Because we're like a tech investment firm. But this idea of being like a brain.

brand genius, right, of understanding the power of the brand feels like something you really, really have in common with that, with liquid death. And I wonder, like, talk to me about the kind of the brand development and how important that is to DDC at a time when DTC is just getting harder and harder. I appreciate the compliment. I don't think I would agree that we have that in common. I think as a company, I didn't say we're equal. I'm just kidding.

I'm just kidding. You know, as a company, we're very focused in direct response marketing. So almost everything we do is with a direct response mindset. And so even marketing channels and other brands or another company might consider brand marketing, we consider performance marketing. So even if we're sending a free sample. How do you break down that difference a little bit for me? What's the difference between demand and performance?

Like brand and performance. So brand is just like awareness, right? Like you know who we are. Well, it's a good question. I mean, a lot of companies don't properly define what brand marketing means to them or how to measure it or what it means to be successful at that. Putting that aside, performance marketing,

we measure by various efficiency metrics and revenue metrics. And so we're looking at mostly blended cost of acquisition, but also on a channel basis and, you know, presented new customers versus returning and things like that. But the vast majority of marketing we're doing, we are measuring as performance marketing. And so we have at our company right now about 55 people. Just to continue to break that down a little bit.

Nothing just goes out there and you're hoping for impressions. You're like, I want to see the metrics. Show me the numbers. Got it. Correct. And that's probably going to evolve a little bit in the future years. But historically, that is being strictly true. And of our company, 55 people, we have probably a 10,

person growth marketing team. We have nobody with the words brand marketing in their title. We have a two or three person social media and community team. And so we view that in the bucket of brand marketing. But we don't have anybody outside organic social media doing any kind of marketing. It's surely for awareness for impressions right now. Of course, we get that as a halo effect of things like TV or influencer marketing, which other companies might consider brand marketing. But we measure them strictly as performance channels. And if they don't meet our CAC guardrails, we turn them off and we don't do it.

I love that. I'm so glad I asked you that question because that's such an interesting and profound distinction. Tell me about some of the things you've turned off. I think this will be so valuable for, you know, CPG companies hoping to follow in your footsteps. Like, don't give away all your secrets, obviously. But, you know, were there things that were counterintuitive

that you thought would work better in terms of performance? and you found like, nah, no, don't bother. Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, there's things every day, but talking about the big things, connected TV is something we don't do very much of, but we do do linear TV. So define the difference. Like you don't advertise on a Roku home screen? Correct.

Connected TV being those sorts of like smart TV, Roku, Hulu, that kind of thing. The upside of doing that is that you're able to target certain demographics, consumers, geographies. The downside is in order to target, you pay more for impression. I think if we had a far more niche product, it might be worth us paying more to target a certain kind of consumer because we're making and selling cereal, which is very mainstream. It's not worth paying that incremental dollar to target a particular consumer. And so advertising on old school linear TV for us is much more cost effective.

And when we measure it, that fits within our sort of cost of acquisition guardrails doing old-school TV. Again, we're not thinking about brand. We're not thinking about impressions of awareness, just running old-school TV ads, measuring online sales that works for us efficiently and profitably, whereas new-school connected TV didn't really. And so that was something that we turned off. There's other things we turned off that, maybe for different reasons, we turn off things that might be efficient but don't hit enough scale. And so in the early days, when we were doing influencer marketing, we'd basically always do influencer marketing on an affiliate basis.

So we'd always pay influencers a percentage of the revenue generated. And that works really well for a small brand because you're guaranteeing efficiency and you're guaranteeing that you're going to be profitable. If you say to an influencer, here's a link or a code, if you post about, say, we'll give you 20, 30% of whatever the sales are. You generate, you know, it's win-win in theory. We found that we couldn't get enough influencers to do that at enough scale that it wasn't worth their time as a company doing that anymore.

And so at that moment in time, we refused to pay people up front because I thought, why should we need to pay an influencer up front? If they think they can generate sales, like they can justify it and, you know, we can align incentives. We've completely changed that approach. And now we almost never do this sort of percentage affiliate model and we almost always pay upfront because the scale is much easier to get. And we're better at predicting whether a certain influencer is going to perform as well.

And so we de-risk it that way. fascinating. Oh man, this is so tactical. I feel like I could ask you this all day long. What was it like? You know, it's possible that rumors of the D to C apocalypse have been somewhat exaggerated, but it has been a tougher time. You raised this big round in December 2020 at a little over a $400 million valuation. What was that like? How did that raise go? How was it, you know, raising in kind of a slightly changing environment around CPG? So the raise was actually a little bit earlier than that, but the environment was still definitely changing. So we did the raise.

It was around the summer. The SEC filing was in December. So that was sort of the quirk with the timing. But it was definitely a weird time for, you know, fundraising in general in the financial markets, fundraising for a direct-to-consumer company, fundraising for a product that is priced at a premium when there's worries about the economy. So a very unique time. I think what we had going for us was this really exciting. like inflection point in our journey.

And of course, whenever a company is fundraising, they talk about inflection points and they sell the next stage of the vision. But we truly had built a pretty substantial direct to consumer business and we hadn't touched retail yet. Right. So retail was this big open promise where almost all cereal is bought and sold. Before we launched, there was basically no cereal being bought online. I think before we launched the entire online cereal market was maybe 20 million or so.

And very quickly, we were doing more than that just in our world. website, let alone all serial online. And so for us, we had a really, really good story to raise around where we built this efficient, fast, large, direct-to-consumer company. We had all this pool from retailers. So we were talking about Targues and Walmart and Kroger earlier. We didn't go out and find them. In basically every case, they came to us. And they'd been coming to us for a while because they saw the DTC traction, the Amazon traction. And so we're able to create really amazing deep partnerships with them where we're getting, you know, in caps, where rather than them charging us fees, we're sort of both investing in the lunch together.

And so we had that story to raison, which made it a lot of easier than it might have been. Otherwise, if we were just a purely DTC company planning to continue to be purely DTC amidst rising acquisition costs and potentially a recession, like that would have been tough. We were taking this momentum of B2C and sort of leveraging that into retail, which is really what the business is going to be in the future. And then I think I asked you a version of this, but what do you think that look? So right now, D to C remains 90%? You said, what do you think that split does look like in the future?

Does it go all the way to 90% retail or is it more like 6040? I think eventually it will go to majority retail, but that'll take a while. So I think once this business, you know, knock on wood here, is eventually doing many, many hundreds of millions in sales. If we're still focused in a narrow range of products, just cereal, I think there is a ceiling for how big a single product direct-to-consumer company can be. And so just by definition, if our business was doing a billion dollars in sales, at that point, I would assume that a real majority would be brick and mortar.

But it's going to take us a while to get there. We've built a large D-C business. We are launching in these nationwide retailers like Walmart and Target. But we're not launching in all their stores. So we're usually launching it in 1,800 Walmart, maybe 1,200 Kroger's, things like that. And so it'll take a while for retail to sort of shift to be the majority. But eventually, I do think that's the case. And that was always the plan.

We didn't start Magic Spoon to be a D2C brand, really. It just sort of started to work out that way early on. If you'd ask me before we launched, I thought we were going to build to, you know, maybe 100 grand in D2C sales and a few. months and then go to retail. But we like blew past that in the first week and just decided to stay DTC because it was working so well and we didn't want to be distracted. But ultimately, we didn't view ourselves as a company whose business model was direct

to consumer. Our business model was sort of reinventing and reimagining cereal. Direct to consumer just happened to be our first distribution channel. But the plan was always to put it everywhere that people buy and sell cereal. Interesting. Yeah, you talked. I think the last time you were on, you talked a lot about focus. and that, you know, this problem that very few food brands evolved beyond a hero product.

Is the cereal the hero product? Like, do you imagine not to distract you, not to take your focus away, but do you imagine future product lines? We're certainly working on future product lines, but they're not going to be the focus. Right now we're very focused on cereal. We've found really phenomenal product market fit here. And again, to become the best-selling serial on Amazon in a couple of years against these established billion-dollar companies that have been around forever, I think speaks to the way the product is resonating, the brand is resonating.

And we think we can get close to that with some other categories. But I think it would be a little bit naive and overconfident to think that we could just churn out another product every six months and everyone would catapult to number one on Amazon. The cereal market was unique. It was uniquely large. It was uniquely lacking in innovation. And so what we want to do is really focus on just dominating that first and foremost. And eventually we have some other ideas we're excited about as well.

And uniquely unhealthy. I mean, it is pretty remarkable that it took Magic Spoon to come along and be like, you know, this doesn't have to be like this. Yeah, it's funny. When we were first starting out, it seemed so obvious to us. But a lot of people thought it was a silly idea. A lot of people said to us, And, you know, people will never spend more than $3 or $3 for a box of cereal.

That's crazy. Or they would say to us, people actually don't want a healthy cereal. And they would point to these examples like, you know, General Mills or Kellogg's, for example, introducing natural colorings on Lucky Charms or Fruitloops or some sugary cereal. And sales went down a little bit. And they would conclude from that that people don't want healthy cereal. I think what was actually going on, obviously, is that somebody who's already eating a sugary cereal, like, Chalachie Choms or Fruit Loops, whether the coloring is natural or not natural, it doesn't matter. It's still an unhealthy cereal.

And so if you're doing something to it, it makes it taste a bit worse, but isn't really moving the needle in terms of being healthy or not, then yeah, that's not going to work. But we clearly saw the need for something that was legitimately transformative from a health perspective relative to everything that was there before us. I'm thinking about the halo effect of Magic Spoon specifically and the the reinvention of childhood favorites that that can lead to, for example, I think Momofuku recently launched like a protein rich ramen. And I could imagine a scenario in which there are multiple food types that get this makeover, not by your company, but that you only benefit from that.

As everybody kind of realizes, like, mac and cheese should not do the things that. that it does to your body, even though it's delicious. Yeah, I think that's amazing. I think there's definitely a moment of, you know, craving nostalgia and comfort foods that are also healthy. I'd love to take a little bit of credit for that. Take it. I'm giving it to you.

Thank you. I appreciate it. But I also think, you know, the pandemic had a lot to do with it. People were at home trying not to be unhealthy when they couldn't leave their house, but also craving some comfort. So there's a lot of different forces at play. And yeah, it's been really incredible. to see different companies release, you know, healthier versions of sort of childlike foods,

whether it's to your point, you know, higher protein or lower carb noodles or slightly healthier mac and cheese or... I don't think that exists yet, by the way. So if anybody's listening, like, please help me, help me. Well, there's a bunch. I mean, you know, Banzah that does chickpea pasta. They have a chickpea mac and cheese now. Yeah, that's true.

There's a bunch of companies trying to do for all kinds of categories. I just want a more fun one, though. I mean, that's the thing about like it's magic spoon. It's like so delightful. It looks like cereal, right? Or like, Momavuku. Like, I need that version. We need that.

I mean, that's where I know that obviously are way more tactical and specific, but that's where brand really does matter. Like there is something about your design and the colors. And I mean, it looks like it makes you remember how much you freaking like cereal. Totally. Totally. Yeah. Well, I joined the board of Mamafuku recently so we can work on that together.

So you are taking credit. As you should. What comes next? I know nobody wants to talk about exit strategy, but what's your takeover the world plan here? Right now we're just trying to take over cereal. I think we're open-minded. The reality of many successful for them beverage companies

is eventually a strategic exit, but we're not really thinking about that. We're trying to dominate the cereal aisle. We have a huge amount of runway ahead of us. we sort of view this as almost the beginning in some ways. Like everything we did direct to consumer online was this amazing bonus, but nobody ever counted on that. Like nobody ever thought we could build a huge serial company on the internet.

And so now we've got that and that's still growing. And now we're building this huge serial company, you know, in real life, on real shelves. And so it's a really exciting time. And we feel like in many ways we haven't captured, you know, anywhere near the majority of the value that we can capture out there. And so we're just getting started. Thrilling. Love it.

Gabby Lewis, co-founder of Magic Spoon. Thank you so much for the time. While I have you, who do you, as you're looking around your industry, who's out there do you think in direct to consumer who's just really exciting in 2023? Like, who should we know about? Not a competitor, obviously, but you must study the landscape. Yeah, it's a great question. We don't have brands that are like single brands we think are nailing everything.

We have brands we look to who are doing a really great job in a single channel, which I think goes to a point earlier focus. It's really hard to be amazing at everything. But we look at brands, you know, I love Athletic Greens. I love what they're doing in endorsement. So Athletic Greens is creating some really deep, you know, real partnerships with content creators, YouTubers, podcasters. And I think they're crushing it in that channel. You know, there's other brands, you know, many cases smaller companies that we think are doing really impressive things with TikTok ads or, you know, leveraging influencers to drive. of trial in store, for example,

Oliop the beverage, who's doing some of the interesting things to sort of leverage their influence of marketing to drive in store velocity. And so it depends on a particular tactic rather than having singular brands we admire, period. Love it. All right, Gabby, I'll let you off the hook.

Thank you so much. I appreciate the time. This is a great update. And congratulations, really, like, what a phenomenal year you're going to have. Thanks for having me. All right, thanks for tuning in everybody. This has been the X-Files reboot

for 2020. I'm Mulder. Wait, who am I? You're Mulder. I'm Scully. Scully. And, yeah, we're just... Halloween.

Covered. That would be... We got Halloween, 2023. Right? We definitely do. And Schully. I'm going to...

We got it. Tomorrow, we're back with another amazing... I am loving the episodes of Angel. I'm loving these. Like, the three-cycle... I'm enjoying. Investor thing is just freaking fascinating. Season 7.

So, first marks, Rick. Heitzman is coming up. What do you, what do you got any, remember any good takeaways? I mean, just amazing that there are people who, you know, kicked butt and had like huge wins in all three cycles and then also watched like a lot of great

companies and a lot of great investments and experiments that shouldn't have failed, fail. And the collective wisdom is extraordinary. You know, I just want to put a shout out here. You got to get Aileen Leon. So maybe you can, she's very podcast shy, but maybe you can email her directly and convince her because she's one of the three cycle. So make a no, which is try to get her on.

Going to. She's notoriously podcast shot. She just replied to us a couple days ago. Oh, okay, good. Okay, let's, I think the way to go. I would love to, but I'm so podcast shy. I can't do it. Can we have Molly?

Ask her if she'll do the interview at Mom. I'll talk to her. Because I did the interview last time. Let's have Molly do it. That would be great. We'll be happy to do it. I'll even like, we could hang out in a coffee shop. Like, we know, we'll just, well, it's cool.

She's really smart. Producers at this week on startups.com. if you have any other folks that you recommend who've invested over all three. I can even open it up a little bit. If they invested in two out of three and we're an entrepreneur during one, I think that would be valid.

So Nick, permission granted. If they operated as a VC during two of the cycles and an entrepreneur during one, I think that would be okay too. Just to open it up if we're having a hard time finding people who invested during all three. Yeah.

We've got a couple coming up that are going to be really good. Awesome. One who is a board member on one of your favorite companies. Can't wait. He works with Zodzlov.

Oh, yeah. That's general Zodzlov. Very nice. It's going to be great. And then one, just like, we won't hit you with this for very much longer. But if you love the show, help us out. Thisweekendstartups.com slash survey. Take our super quick survey to tell us a little bit about yourself.

We are almost there. We're like, we got, we just, we have, I believe, close to a statistically significant sample. Perfect. Yes. Just tell us like what you're. what you're involved in purchasing or buying for your company, your startup, whatever big company, small company, it doesn't matter. Just tell us a little bit about you.

And, you know, when we go talk to advertisers, it helps us if we can tell them like, hey, here is listening. And so, you know, if you made it to this point in the show, you're a loyal. Well, honestly, it's good for us to know, too, for programming our content, you know. Absolutely. It's great to find out what you want more of. So, what's up. Thanks.

Great job, everybody. And we'll see you tomorrow on the show. Bye-bye. Man, my metatrade is looking good. I was good. 56.8% I'm up. My Netflix trade I'm up 30%. My Adobe trade I'm up 24%.

Really easy to get in my list of trade. I'm up 34%. I'm praying to the good gods that you call the bottom. It would be so nice if that was the bottom. It would be, wouldn't it? I mean, people are so speculating. I guess we're in overtime here.

Let's keep it in the show. But jatrading.com is doing pretty good here. Great news today. Wage is way down. Yeah. Oh, yes. Yay. And they said there's a, it went from a 60% chance to a 70% chance that no rate height comes next month.

I don't believe. Well, the hot one this week, or 25? Yeah. That's not going to happen. I'm okay with like taking the whole medicine now and taking the 50 bibs. But we take 25 bibs and 25 bits. I'm fine with that. I just want everything to start stabilizing.

And I think the main issue here, we'll put this in for overtime. Sorry, folks. we had two endings of the show. I think the main issue here is immigration again, which I've been bringing up for years. We have low participation in working. We have people have not been led into the country legally, illegally, and any other way possible for like two administrations now.

This is not a Republican or a Democrat thing. We just are anti-immigration. Yes. And, like, Republicans. Republicans blocked the path to, like they blocked all the dream stuff. And then now that they've taken control of the Congress on running heavily on immigration, nothing. Like nothing.

And Biden's like, okay, we need to do something congressionally, which we do. And everybody is to blame for that. But if you look at who is like making it an issue but then not doing anything about it, 70, 30, whatever it is. Well, it's not a popular thing to let people into the country and get elected president. I think everybody is scared of being pro-immigration because you can lose. Which is so crazy too because like we need workers. We need workers.

And if you talk to anybody, you know, who is in the service business, you know, you just, you can't get workers and people don't need to work. They're bunking up with their friends. They're talking out of it. I'm going to save us this one time too from getting canceled. Not just service workers either. Like, No, that is the biggest doctors.

Like, my mom is in North Dakota. I swear to God. That's happening too. There's, most of the doctors are immigrants, and then they leave immediate. Like, there's just these massive shortages. They have like an endocrinologist

in the whole state, one. That's the big problem, too, is people are retiring early. So you get to like 65 or 62, and you're like, I made my money. My house is worth a lot. Maybe I'd just retire early, you know? I would like, maybe I retire early.

I've had this discussion here on the air. Like, hey, maybe I retire. I was like, oh, I like working. But people do at some point when they're 60, something are just like, I'm done. Yeah, I'm 58.

Maybe I'm done. You know, I was going to do 64, 62. Ah, I'll just retire 58. Yeah. If it was a bummer.

So yeah, you're right. I mean, it's everything from plumbers to dishwashers, everything, to doctors, to nurses. Engineers.

And you tell that more people in the country. The Fed cannot raise rates enough to solve the immigration problem. We don't have enough workers. It's that simple. They can't create people. Like we have a declining birth rate. It's not their mandate.

huge number of boomers retiring. Like, we know these conditions and we're not doing anything. Like, until we deal with immigration, for real, we're doing nothing to stop them. Three, and literally I heard downtown Josh Brown on CNBC saying this exact same thing that I've been saying for a couple of years and just to build on his comments. Like, he was like, if you talk to any, if you go, if you're on any of the earnings calls with hotel chains, they're like, we can't, we can't clean the room. fast enough. We don't have front desk people. We don't have room service. We can't get anything done because we don't have workers. And that's the blocker, right? And we're just never going to get there. And the Fed has like, as downtown Josh Brown said today, he's like, they have two tools. They can talk

and make statements and they can raise that Fed rate. Neither of those will manifest workers. You just have to change this from immigration to there's two types of immigration and then there's recruiting people. Recruit people we need. Put that at a in a recruiting bucket and just reframe it so that people don't get triggered. If you reframed and said, hey, you don't have enough doctors to take care of mom and dad, grandma and grandpa, we're going to recruit some. Is that okay with you? Who's going to make that a political issue? Oh, we need more endocrinologist? Great. How many do we need? 175? Great. There's 175 open right now. If you want your, you want citizenship and a green card, here it is. We need to fill 175.

Like put it out like a job wreck. Yeah. And make an office. not immigration, recruitment, create a new position. We need to recruit plumbers. Great. Are there any plumbers in Mexico, Canada,

South America, Asia, Africa who want to come here. We need 1,200 plumbers. Is this just too logical, Molly? The problem, no. It is, I mean, yes, it is, actually.

The simple answer is, yes, it is too logical because you have to undo the decades of deliberate racism in order to make that logic stick. Like, this has been driven on purpose by stoking, you know, racial fears and fears of, and, and, and economic fears, fears, fears, fears of job replacement. So, that took our jobs.

Even the people who aren't working, right? Like, even the ones dying of, like, deaths of despair or whatever who aren't working and who have this problem and that problem and the whatever would still be like they can't come and take our jobs, especially not for the brown. So that you have to get, there's a huge emotional hurdle. to get over before you can get to the logical solution. If you're retired, even if you're not working, even if you've opted out, you're still mad about somebody taking the job

that you refuse to take. Yeah. I don't want to be a housekeeper at a hotel, but I'm mad that somebody else got to come in and take that job. I mean, seriously. I don't want to be a plumber and clean, literally, it's a, you know, you got to deal with a lot of poo-pooh. It's a crappy job.

I don't deal with clog toilets. The crappy job. It's a crappy job. I don't want to deal with them either. Yep. But I don't want you to deal with them either. Great. So they're just being backed up.

All right, everybody, thanks for tuning in. There's a little overtime at the end. Canceled again. Third Rail week here continues. Third Rail week here at this weekend startups. Remember they had ratings week on TV? I guess I'm not sick anymore. I'm coming back, right?

Manager's back. You're back. You're back. You're back. Remember ratings week? I can't keep you on the rails, Jason. You're too back. I need you get a little sick again.

You're fucking out of your mind lately. Focus on. I mean you like 15% sick. It could be that I'm on an inhaler right now. That's a little speedy. You're out of control. It's steroids. I took the inhaler to open my lungs up.

It could be a little speedy. Anyway. Oh, my God. Remember they had the ratings week on sweep's week? Sweeps week. That's how Shark Week existed, back to sharks. Right. They used to have a one, every, like twice a year maybe, they would have that ratings week.

So everybody had to program that week to get max ratings. So what did they do? Stunts. Stunts. that's where a lot of this date lying stuff came from. Yeah. Those kind of stunt things. So like this will be the stunt week.

You cannot not tune in. And of course they were all like recording one week for ratings. So then everybody stun, stunt, stunt, stunt, stunt, we're trying to outstunt each other. And here we are. Yeah. And now we have that 24-7 globally. Yeah. I mean, guys.

Everybody thinks that like I don't have a lot of feelings about this at this point. I'm just happily, I'm just rationally nihilistic. Like, no, we are f***ed. For sure. I have a new idea. I was just thinking today, like, people should read books. So I was like, you know what somebody should do? You should do a TikTok where they read, you know, a page of a book and just do like all 300 pages as 300 TikToks.

So you could just sit there and just TikTok and somebody reads to the book. That would be amazing, actually. It's a great idea. Like if you could just take a random page, you know. You should do that with Angel. I should just read Angel. Yeah. As TikToks.

Because the safest way. to do is with a book that you read, but it's like your own audiobook, Angel has TikToks. This is a really interesting idea. If I just read like 100 pages of the 300 randomly and just page one, page seven, page nine. It's actually like the cheapest, easiest content ever because it's already right. And you just like lighted perfectly and me like a reading from the book of. Aw, you got a little pipe. A little pipe by the fireplace. Hilarious. Actually, I can just read like great because there are some public domain books. I could just read great expectations to people by the fireplace.

The Tale of Two Cities. I can just read a Tal of Two Cities. That'd be hilarious. Jaycott reads Italo Two Cities. All right, everybody. We'll see you tomorrow. Okay, bye. Okay, bye.