This Week in Startups - Jack's Twitter take & employee reactions, Medical NFTs, Hopin's $200M founder secondary sale | E1444

Episode Date: April 26, 2022

All news. We break down, Jack chiming in on Twitter’s sale to Elon Musk and the employee reactions (2:21). Then, we talk about an NFT project where Doctor influencers on TikTok are selling access to medical advice (40:02). To wrap, we cover Hopin’s fundraising at a large valuation, its founder's $195M secondary sale and more (52:27). (00:00) Jason and Molly tee up today’s news stories (02:21) What did “Jack After Dark” have to say about Twitter deal? (14:56) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://Squarespace.com/TWIST (16:05) Jack feels Elon and Parag want Twitter to be maximally trusted and broadly inclusive (20:30) How are Twitter employees feeling about the Elon Twitter deal? (27:14) Embroker - Get an extra 10% off insurance for your business at https://Embroker.com/twist (28:29) Twitter has locked down any changes related to their platform to keep employees from “going rogue” (35:01) Vanta - Get $1,000 off automating your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist (36:15) People do their best work with Elon (40:02) TikTok famous doctors are getting into NFT’s, and it’s a mess (52:27) Hopin: virtual event startup struggles, their founder cashed out to $195M FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Okay, everybody, we have a great show for a Tuesday for you. We do. We were all waiting to see what Jack Dorsey was going to have to say about Twitter sale to Elon Musk. And he had some after dark thoughts and we break him down. We love Jack after dark. And then we're going to talk about the range of emotions from Twitter employees. Yeah. And, you know, some users as well.

Then finally, we're going to change the topic. Talk about an NFT project where what could go wrong, Dr. Influencers on TikTok are selling access to medical advice. We live in the nightmare. Okay. And finally, there was a financial time story about Hopkins fundraising. This is a company that went from $250 million valuation up to $8 billion in under two years. The founder sold almost $200 million can share us in secondary.

And is this company as bad as the Financial Times is making it out to be? They did a layoff. We actually do the map, and the answer might in fact surprise you about hopping. You are going to want to stay tuned. And stay tuned all week because there are some big earnings calls coming up this week. We got Google and Microsoft later today as we're taping this. Meta and Spotify on Wednesday, Apple and Amazon on Thursday. It's going to be a great week.

It's going to be a great show. So stick with us. Stick with us for the whole week. Stick with us. Don't go anywhere. Don't go anywhere. Don't touch that tile. Don't touch that tile. This week in startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website.

Go to Squarespace.com slash Twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use OfferCode Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Embroker Embroker'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 imbroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist. And 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. Hey, everybody, welcome to Tuesday. It's Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday. after a big Monday. My God, Molly, what are we going to talk about today? What could be in the news today on a Tuesday? If only there were something to talk about. If only. Okay, here's what happened.

The moment everyone was waiting for happened yesterday. Yes. What is Jack going to say? All right. What is Jack going to say? The deal is done. Was it a conspiracy? Did Jack help make this happen?

And then he tweeted his full thoughts on the matter. a Jack After Dark, T.M. Jason Caliganis. Yes, I love Jack After Dark. His full thoughts last night in a thread Let me hear him. That started with a link to Radiohead's, everything is in its right place. In case you thought this was not going to go

in the totally most unbearably pretentious direction, you were mistaken. Everything in its right place is how this started. I like it. I like it. He started with a theme. He's setting a mood. It's a mood.

It's a mood. It's a mood. It's a mood. And then he goes on to tweet, I love Twitter. Twitter is the closest thing we have to a global consciousness. Agree. I agree with that statement. I agree with that statement. Oh, okay.

I mean, everybody important in the world? It's 300 million people. Yes. And it's a global kind. I mean, this is like Jack after dark. I like it. I'm here for it. The idea and service. I mean, I didn't have 5 milligram edible before he started to show. But I'm here for it. He's feeling it. He's feeling it. The idea and service is all that matters to me and I will do whatever it takes to protect both.

Twitter as a company has always been my sole issue and my biggest regret. Okay, honest. It has been owned by Wall Street and the ad model. Taking it back from Wall Street is the correct first step. So, confirming effectively everything that you and we have said about the problems with trying to operate Twitter as a public company. I love Jack. I love Jack. When Jack was starting that company, I was at the Allen & Company conference, and I said, if you ever need a board member, I think this is going to be the biggest thing ever.

We were just like going for a walk, you know, between like conferences or whatever. And this is the Allen Company, like, smaller conference, which they're pretty discreet about, which was like for like up-and-comers, not the big one. And I was like, you know, have you ever need a... This is when they were just hatching the idea, so to speak. But I do think he's right. at Wall Street for this company has been very difficult. And the reason is the public comp of Facebook and, you know,

and trying to keep up with that, which is like Yahoo trying to keep up with Google. And it makes you do unnatural things when you have shareholders who made a bet on both companies. And they're like, this one is not growing like this one. So how does this one grow like that one? And that just sent them into like Yahoo, a tailspin. Like Yahoo had a lot of promise.

They should have leaned into content and services. They could have been a collection of brands. There was a couple of different ways to go. Going all in on video since they lost search would have been a great move. That's what I advocated for. Just go all in on video. Well, see, that's where like, yes, go all in on something. Like, I'm not 100% willing to let Jack off the hook for the lack of innovation for a long time.

Like, yeah, maybe you need to show growth and need to do this. But there was, there is a lot of space to innovate. when you're a CEO and he had two jobs. That was a challenge and also there was the musical chairs. He had Ev, Jack, Ev, Dick Costello, Jack, Ev, whatever. Or Jack and any one of them

could have innovated. Well, and it's hard when you've got, when you have public investors saying this is the North Star metric, Dow's, MOWs, daily active users, monthly active users, add revenue, whatever. And they were,

just not able to do what Facebook was doing. And so they every, there was never enough time to execute. And this is why sometimes a company that's kind of lost like they should be private, because it might take two years to clean it up. You might have to lay off half the company. You may have to shut down four or five things that are pretty good, but not great, right? Because you can't boil the ocean and you need to have one thing that is growing in order to be a public company. But he maybe could have, he maybe could have laid off half of the people. at any time. He maybe could have said,

we're doing a massive restructuring. Like, I just think... The board would have to approve it. That's the problem. You're never... You, Jason, are never going to have a power struggle at your company because you're in charge of your company. Yes.

If you have a power struggle at your company, you need to look in the mirror a little bit. Well, they did set this thing up with out founder authority, because there were two founders. Biz asked to be a founder and, like, they gave him that. But really, it was Jack and Ed. I mean, maybe I'll give Biss credit for that. You know, he was there for the beginning.

Yeah, I think it's fair to give him credit. But really, Jack created it. Ev created the company. Bizz, you know, operated the company with them. So those are three co-founders. You know, they didn't have enough ownership each. They lost control of the company. The board got really big.

And then you had this Facebook thing. And nobody was a Franks Lutman. Nobody was a Mark Zuckerberg, even a Sherylson. There was no general. There was no general. And I just think it is very easy now to sort of lionize everything that Jack has done. But the fact is, like, this happened under his watch. This decay started there.

Yeah. And also remember, first time CEO. Jack was a first time CEO. Yeah. First public company. Like, you know, listen, when this thing was created, we were all kids, you know, 30 years old or something. I'm not saying I could have done it. Right.

But I am saying nobody would take my company away from me and I wouldn't sit there and have another job and let it goof up and then sit here and be like, this was never my fault. well I mean I'm not saying it's his fault he's he is taking ownership there isn't he like he says like this my big regret so that I mean regrets is my big regret but not like I ever tried this to change it well we don't know we don't know we don't know what happened on the board so as a company has always been my sole issue like I think he's referring to like the company of it not the product like it should never have been a company regret well I mean he does believe that the internet is also challenging I mean we've all super distorting It's super distorting. For the New York Times, for CNN, for Fox, and for Twitter, and for Facebook. Yep.

When you are advertising based and you're trying to grow, if you're advertising based and you're not trying to grow or you don't care about growth all that much, it's not that big of a deal. It's when you're a public company and you need to grow 30% year over year in your advertising base, unnatural things can occur.

Yes. And that's, I think, the challenge. And that specific business model is super distorting. Like, I will 100% give him that. I'm just going to push back on the idea that he, like, was doing everything perfectly and... Oh, I don't think... I don't think Twitter was far from perfect. I think everybody who ran it could have done better. You know, all three potential CEOs probably have a lot of regrets. Yeah. And, you know, he's sort of saying that. But anyway, let's continue. What else is he said on? Yes, he goes on to say, in principle, I don't believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Okay. That is explosive and a real thought bomb. You know, what he's saying there is like this should be like HTTP, the web, it should be like SMTP, it should be like RSS.

Right. It should be like URLs, but like it or like email. When I say SMTP, that's email. When I say HPP, that's the web. And, you know, basically RSS is syndication like blogs and podcasts. So he's right that in the early days of Twitter, they did support RSS feeds. You could subscribe to Jack's RSS feed. And they, I believe, deprecated that. And so if it was an open platform and you owned your profile,

I own Twitter.com slash Jason, you own slash Molly Wood. And they couldn't turn you off. And you could publish to your own location. And then the Twitter client would pull in that data. So if Alex Jones wants to publish his blog and his creation, It wouldn't be Twitter that would be publishing. He would be publishing his feed somewhere and then all the feeds would be pulled together like an email client does, whether it's superhuman, Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, or a browser.

I mean, that's just describing, it's not a business. It's describing the web. It's describing blogs that were aggregated via RSS or by search engines. Weirdly, it's describing Yahoo. Like, you sort of, but at some point that middle layer always becomes a company. which is how it gets distorted, I guess. Anyway, he says, okay, solving for the problem of it being a company, however, Elon is the singular solution. I trust.

I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness. So, you know, Elon has always said, like, part of like being multi-planetary is, like, you know, the light of consciousness. Oh, okay. This is an Elon phrase. That is an Elon phrase. The light of consciousness, Elon phrase. And I think also a Sam Harris phrase and, you know, we're all friends and buddies. And, you know, I've heard Elon talk for many, many times about like, we've had long, deep conversations, my friend's circle, about what would end humanity if it did end.

Yeah. You know, and pandemic, nuclear war or, you know, mine was always like some random object hitting the earth because that happened before. Yeah. It's likely to happen again. I mean, the sun also having like some solo flare. So I've had these conversations with many of my friends over time, Larry and Sergey, I've had this conversation with. It's always been like a 15, 20 years ago conversation that, you know, a lot of people like to have, which was, hey, if humanity were to end, what will we do? And how would we prevent that?

And being on another planet is the ultimate way to back up. And in fact, people don't know this, but the SpaceX project, Elon's first idea was, and the reason he was looking at Russian rocket ships was to back up the biosphere. I don't know if anybody knows this or if it's in any of the biographies. I've never read any of the unauthorized biographies. But he was thinking about taking every biological thing on the planet, plants, seeds, etc. And then putting them into a space station that would circle the earth or the moon or putting them on the moon, some concept like that. And that's when he and Adeo were in Russia looking at missiles and seeing if they could rent one to put this thing up in space. And then that's when Elon was like, wait a second, why don't I just make the missiles rockets myself?

Right. Wow. But it was an arc project originally. It was an, yeah, I don't know what arc means, but. Like Noah's Ark, you know. Oh, Noah's Ark. Yes, it's exactly what it was. And there's actually a movie called Silent Running, which somebody will pull up the trailer

with and we'll play a little bit with the sound off so we don't have a strike against us. But that one had like the original R2D2 in it, Bruce Stern. And it's like, I think it was 73 it came out and Star Wars came out in 77. So George Lucas kind of cribbed a little bit from this. And they both cribbed it from a French comic book. which had like a lot of these Star Wars themes in it, which you can look up online, the inspirations for Star Wars came from Silent Running

and some other 2001 Space Odyssey. So anyway, that's the light of consciousness concept. Got it. Here's silent running. I recommend now, I mean, I have to see this. My son's in a big film school phase right now too, so we're going to watch this together. Yeah, this is amazing.

But there is the biosphere, silent running. Yeah. And there's like, does it remind you of Star Wars a bit? Yes. And so there it is. These are, and there's Bruce Stern who is supposed to maintain this biosphere. And at some point they may show the robot that he, anyway, somebody can pull up the little robot he interacts with like a picture of it. You'll find it.

But it's a really cool movie. It's got a lot of really interesting science fiction ideas. That's amazing. Yeah, Octavia Butler, she's got these books called The Parable of the Sower. It's a trilogy. Oh, there it is. See that little robot? That's the little robot.

That's totally... It's totally R2D2, yeah. It's a little robot. He interacts. He plays cards with. He talks to it. It's literally R2D2 before R2D2. Okay, we have some exciting news for you right now.

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I think, yeah, Jack is saying, like, Elon's a great steward of the brand. I think not, I think it being private will allow them to clean up a lot of these issues. And, you know, I think that's a good segue into maybe the employee's reaction. And he says, I will say one last thing I thought was very interesting is that he, Jack went on to say that Elon and Parag share the same goal of creating a maximally trusted and broadly inclusive platform. and he writes, thank you both for getting the company out of an impossible situation.

Okay. So there's a conspiracy theory, I guess. We all totally agreed, though, that it was an impossible situation also, yeah. Well, if you have a board of directors that owns, like, I don't know what the total they owned, but it was like 0.001%. They were like this professional elite class of people stewarding this with no ownership. We talked about that.

It's like a weird thing. And then you have all these people who own whatever, for one to 10% who don't have board seats. It's like, this really isn't representing the shareholder class. It's representing what? Like a bunch of intellectual folks who get a lot of power, you know, joy, whatever, whatever non-financial motivations they get out of being on the board. A cynical person would say power.

And, you know, a generous person might say, you know, doing what's in the public interest for this platform, right? and could be some combination of those things. Humans are complex. I might want to be on the board of Twitter for the status of it, sure. Or status-seeking animals. It might also be intellectually curious

and you might have a specific agenda like you believe in free speech or you believe in getting rid of online harassment or having great conversations, whatever it is, or making political change in the world. You could have multiple things, but it's just not going to result

in a great company or product. it's going to result in a company going sideways. So the good news is, during this lost decade, Twitter didn't die. Twitter could have died during this holding. Absolutely. Yeah, that was a distinct possibility. Had it not been, I think, for the Trump presidency and Trump himself, Twitter probably would have.

I mean, it was in a pretty more of a state. The Trump bump was very important. For Twitter, without a doubt. And for the New York Times and MSNBC and for Fox. Absolutely. I mean, that was a, I mean, if you look at CNN's, I was trying to find a historical chart of CNN's ratings. When you see their ratings during like impeachment hearings and I mean, that's when Rachel Maddo, Anderson and Fox, it's just, but really the left side because we were also like, oh my God, this presidency is the craziest thing ever? Yep.

Like, is this guy going to be impeached? Is he, you know, controlled by the Russians? I mean, it was just, and he was creating so much chaos. you couldn't help but look because we've never had a president act insane. I mean, there's no other way to say it. I mean, he was acting insane and you're like, is this the real world? Because this feels like some side of dystopian sci-fi comedy that the president would act. It's like idiocrycy or something.

It really was. And it was the biggest story. I mean, lest you think that the media would like things to be boring. No, no, no, no. You are dead wrong. There are plenty of people at all of them. those outfits out who are just praying that Trump's account is reinstated on Twitter. Just praying for it.

Yes. Like I'm not trying to be painfully cynical on a Tuesday, but like, well, I mean, yes, he was entertaining on the platform. You can't radicalize an opposition to nothing. You got to have something on the other side or else it's just not a fun game. I've heard many people on the left say it would be really great if Trump got reinstated right now because it would enhance turnout for this midterm election. could be. And they're saying Democrats aren't going to come out because that's always how it is. When you win, you get complacent. When you lose, you get charged up. And that the right and listen, I'm no expert on this, but that does seem to trend correct. If Trump was here acting crazy, you're like, oh my God, I don't want that guy back. I better vote if you're on that's, if you're, you know, anti-Trump. So that doesn't make sense. It is direction correct. But let's go to the employees. Let's do that. Let's go to the employees because I'll give the caveat here that there are 8,000 employees and thousands of contracts.

tractors, I believe. So I think the actual real number of people working at on Twitter is over 10,000. Um, so if you were to sample them, you could, depending on how you, you know, dip your, you know, bucket into that sample, it could go either way. Because there's a lot of different feelings here. But what was the best representation that we found here on the pod for how employees are feeling. So with that obvious disclaimer that right with that obvious disclaimer that we don't know just like glass door can be shaved Wikipedia can be shaped the press could shape you know how this looks based on who they talk to. Exactly. Initially it did seem like it was one giant freak out over at Twitter and on Twitter by the way.

I mean the number of people just declaring that they had to leave now and like giving tearful goodbyes and mourning their time on the platform was just a little bit. You're talking about users or employees? I'm talking about users now. And then I think some of them were employees too. So one New York Times reporter, Tom and Joseph Smith, his thread went viral because he said it is absolutely insane at Twitter right now in the virtual valves of private slack rooms and employee group techs. I feel like I'm going to throw up. I really don't want to work for a company that's owned by Elon Musk. One other source that I don't really know what I'm supposed to do.

Oh, my God. I hate him. Why does they even want this? And then platformer Casey Newton wrote in a more sort of balanced approach. that yes, as a group, Twitter employees did seem to be negative about the acquisition, but when he started talking to employees one-on-one, he would find that responses were, quote, more tempered. He wrote, some employees I've spoken with are open to the idea that a private Twitter run by Musk stands a better chance of improving the service than would a

public company beholden to its shareholders. They like the fact that he wants to eliminate harmful bots and bring more clarity to how recommendation algorithms work, almost as a public company. though, in fact, these Twitter employees are acting just like, you know, everybody else, like people. Yeah. Like, uh, so my read on this would be if you are publicly, um, now again, this was a New York Times person, you know, quoting Slack stuff, you're going to have a range of people who are going to be inspired by the change here. And you're also going to have change is scary.

Yeah. This is a change. It's a big change. because they have stock options. And so if you, just to have empathy here for the person who's been working there for three years, they've vested 75% of their shares, they have a strike price of $47. Okay, do I get my shares? Do I get $54?

Do I keep my shares? And then we're going to go public again in four years and I have to wait another five years. Are these RSUs? My understanding is people were calling Charles Schwab. I read in one story and just trying to get some clarity. So when it's your kids, you know, college tuition or inheritance or your mortgage payments, yeah, I mean, this is going to be scary for some people.

Also, it's their livelihood. Also, they're vested. Also, Elon did, as our producer's note, make kind of a joke about firing everybody. Yes. And I think the very difficult thing they were talking about with whoever would take over Twitter during a numerous, numerous times when they were looking for new leadership, the question was, who is going to be

willing to make cuts? Because the company could run with probably 2,000 people, like 75% less people. And almost universally, when you make deep cuts like this, the organization functions better. Because who do you cut? Well, the truth is, when these cuts happen, and people won't say this publicly, because they want to be gracious about it, you cut the weakest people. the organization. You obviously wouldn't cut the high performers. So you go to the managers and you're like, you've got a team of 10. You get to keep six. Which four are you cutting? And so like a

basketball team, you'd be like, well, Steph Curry stays, Draymond stays, Clay stays. We know those three are safe. Okay. Now who's in between. But I guarantee your bench is not Wiggins and Gary Payton, you know, like it's not. You're going to have to make hard decisions. Your bench is probably not that good and or you're going to have to make hard decisions. It could be developing players. They could just not be as great as the and mature as the players who are at the top. Maybe they're fine. Yeah, we have no idea.

We have no idea. And we don't know that they failed to tackle these problems. We only know the incentives probably told them not to. Like, maybe there are plenty of engineers there who are totally capable of turning off the spam. There was probably some hand-wringing and lack of leadership as to what the goal is. That will be gone in a private company. Yeah. Because it's a private company, when it's owned by one person, you have found a authority.

And just like Steve Jobs said, you know what? We're going with the phone first, then we're doing the tablet. And his team had said, well, the tablet's what, you know, works. And look how beautiful it is. He's like, it's not responsive enough. Let's iterate a couple of times on the batteries and the touchscreen on a smaller screen. And then we'll get to the tablet later. They're like, well, Bill Gates has got a tablet out now.

We should compete. You know, it's like, nope. We're going to go after the phone. Chase, chase. You have to make some bold decisions, right? Absolutely. And this is, Cybertruck's a bold decision.

Cybertruck also has, I don't know what the reservations are now for cybertruck, but it was bonkers how many cyber truck reservations there were. And the cyber truck does not look like a pickup truck. They didn't go the Rivian route and they're like, let's make something that looks like a F-150. That's founder authority. You cannot make a bold choice like that in a committee

with a board that owns 0.001% collectively. that's a decision that the God Queen or God King can make. They can say, you know what? We're going to go for it. We're going to do something crazy here. Again, I don't know what the reservations are for Rivian versus Cybertruck right now. I think that kind of shows what founder authority can do because that odd looking truck is inspired people, probably most of which are buying their first truck to jump on board.

And they didn't go after just the truck owners. They went after, hey, maybe you own. You know, I don't know, an SUV and you want this rad cyber truck that looks like nothing else on the road. Yeah. Well, and I don't know that you get a Ford F150 Lightning without cyber truck. Like the existence itself spurs change. So once you make this big bold bet, you cause a whole cascade of change as a result of it. I'm going to quickly explain one crucial type of insurance that all startups need.

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Easy to remember this week in startups, T-W-I-S-T. Go to In-B-B-R-K-E-R-com slash twist and use that offer code. TWIST. Some interesting breaking news related to Twitter employees, Twitter has locked down any changes to the platform. Now, this isn't unusual. Of course, you would freeze like product,

probably like rollouts in advance of a new owner. However, they will not allow any product updates unless they're business critical. And evidently, according to these anonymous sources talking to Bloomberg, Twitter imposed the temporary ban to keep employees who may be miffed about the deal from, quote, going rogue. Oh.

Oh. That's fascinating. I could see somebody doing that. If you did that as an employee, you would be responsible, legally, financially, and career-wise. I'm just, for the record, like, probably not a great idea.

Like, Chelsea Manning, you know, did something like with, as a conscientious objector in terms of making stuff and paid a massive price. her freedom. I think she goes by her now, not they. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm sorry, I don't have the pronouns. Oh, I think so, yeah. I'm pretty sure she's a she, not a thay. But somebody can correct me if apologize if I'm not up to date on it. But she was a he at the time. She made a really serious decision to link that information and went to jail for close to a decade?

And I, if you just please, if you're thinking about doing this, think about the ramifications of going to jail. Don't do it. Could you imagine? Somebody at Twitter, just, I mean, people have done this kind of stuff before. I know, totally. You know, like, and it could wind up ruining your life. Yeah. Like, literally your freedom could be at stake. I mean, it's almost for their own protection that they.

I mean, the obvious thing to do would be to turn off Elon's account or something. You know, like, but this kind of childishness is cybercrime. And I'll tell you something. The three-letter agencies are they got a real chip on their shoulder about cyber stuff. And they've made the point over and over again, rest in peace, Aaron Schwartz, being the ultimate example of it.

They will take it to the mat to a level that is, you know, some people might consider derange when cyber crime occurs. You know, and people who burn a building down make it five years in jail. And people who, you know, do cyber crime, they'll look at it and say,

well, the building would cost $5 million, but the harm here was $50 million. So it should be 10 times as much. So people feel like digital crime is, the thinking is like something you could roll back easily and digital crime is not that big of a deal. It turns out the feds actually take it more seriously, it seems, on all accounts. So please don't do something like that. For your own, that would be a really dumb thing to do. That would be a really dumb thing to do.

Yeah. But it's fascinating to me. I mean, I feel like you never know what to think about this kind of reporting. like on the one hand it would be 100% I would think standard operating procedure to lock the platform. Sure, of course. When a new owner is coming

and that doesn't even sound that like weird but you do, but then. It's a great clickbaiting story. Let's be honest. It's a great, right. It's a great clickbaiting quote. Like nobody's going to go rogue. Come on.

Yes. I mean, they're almost incentivizing people to go rogue by being like, hey, here's what you could do. Like give them the idea. Exactly. It's a little inception here. Like, and we're here to unwrap, unwind that for you. Yeah.

Young people. Don't ever. do something stupid like this. If you want to do something stupid, like get your friends to bring a mariachi band and like storm out of the building playing, like having a marching band, I quit and then march out with the marching band. Like those people are doing on TikTok, so it's like stunt

resignations. Yeah. Now I don't know if I would hire somebody who did a stunt resignation. I might do it just for the LOLs. Depends. Depends. If you're in marketing, I might actually do a stuff. I might actually appreciate if you're in the marketing department doing a gorilla stunt. I mean, it would depend on the circumstance. Your boss was a true jerk.

I know. And you went out with a marching band? Respect. Maybe. Maybe respect. You got a brand now. You got a brand. Yeah, maybe.

I, yeah, before we move on to other fun text stories, I mean, we'll all get our last thoughts in, but I did think to myself watching the Sturm and Drong and everybody freaking out and all the, you know, the rending of the faces and I'm going to Canada. Exactly. But it was like, okay, we're all on this platform and it sucks. It makes us feel bad every day. Yes. It is not functional.

It does not offer the features that we wanted to offer. Continue. It has only gotten worse in terms of spreading and peddling disinformation and sadness and division. Amen. Continue. No, you want to maybe see if the guy can make it better before you lose your ever-loving and stomp off like a child? I'm putting my hands up, praise Jesus.

Like, here is a rational assessment of the situation. The system has been broken for a decade. It hasn't gotten better. We all hate certain aspects of it. Okay, the guy's coming in, he's executed well, he's got a vision, he's been pretty clear and upfront about what it is. Give him a shot. If you don't like it.

Literally, we could all just go over to Instagram. We could all go over to back to blogging. We could go to Facebook. We can go to LinkedIn. There's a million places we can go. the same, no, it's nuanced different. But if Elon were to do and the new management or the existing management,

whatever, the reconstructed team, however it gets reconstructed, I have no insight there, were to do something crazy with the platform. Well, that would just be an opportunity for somebody to create an alternative. Exactly. Just like TikTok created an alternative to Instagram and YouTube created an alternative to, you know, blogging and other things that came before it and other video services

that came before it. A hundred percent optional to be there. And it's not, it would be hard to make it worse. So like, maybe just chill out and see what happens. And I just want to shout out, Rachel. I don't want to hear any stunt resignations on, uh, OK, boomer on Friday, okay? I'm not, I'm not accepting like I want Rachel to go do a stunt. She's like, Rachel is typing.

She's like, oh, I have a plan. Oh, I got my start resignation, cute. Ordering a band off magic. Fiverr.com forget your band. Use the promo code twist. promo code twist. Oh, my God. Listen, when you're a founder, it's fun to trade your craziest stories with other founders.

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I love this story. I think this is a Rachel story. Oh, this is a Molly story. This is a Molly story. I like got obsessed with this in the morning when I was looking for any other news. Yes. And I'm absolutely, shout out to the team for making this into an incredible story.

Look at all this right up. Okay, but let me just say for the employees over at Twitter, great opportunity. I have met countless people over the decades who work for Elon. They uniformly report they did their best work one of the most inspired working at SpaceX Tesla, Neuraling, boring. I've met countless people who've worked with him.

I know him. It's an inspiring person. I've watched him work. He's an inspiring leader. He gets done. He's focused. He sets incredible goals. It's all about the work.

Now, if you're on vacation and you're, it's kind of like a dope gig where you're getting paid six figures to fuck off, yeah, you probably should polish off your resume and go to Hoto. Hoodle. What was he at? What did they call it in Silicon Valley? What did they call Google? I had an effort.

Hooli. Hooli. Go hodle at Hooli. Go hodle your Bitcoin and your doge at Huli. And show title. And show title. Kotal at Huli. That's a better place.

I mean, Google appreciates people not doing work. Yeah. They love that. They love taking talent off the market and putting them on the roof and letting them rest invest. You're not going to rest, invest, at an Elon Musk, own Twitter. You're going to do your best work. If you're up for that, then do your best work.

If you're not, highly recommend polishing off your resume and finding another cushy gig somewhere where you're not affected. And you know what? Personally, that's how you are. Personally, if I was running Twitter and we had that big, beautiful office, I would do year zero. This is if I was CEO. If magically somebody said, J-Cal, you want to be CEO of Twitter?

If somebody said that to me, like if I knew somebody at Twitter and they said, you know what? Just like randomly. I know you're thinking about semi-retirement, but here's a thought. And they said, J-Gal, you know what? You understand Twitter. Why don't you run it? If somebody said that, I would come in and I'd say, guess what? It's year zero.

We are going to have this office building filled and this is going to be the locus of power and this is going to be, you know, a seven day a week operation. we are going to really crush it and make a big effort in the first year. If you want to be part of that, you know, I'm going to need you to show up. You know, some people might be remote. Of course, there might be some all stars. But let's all go to this amazing, brilliant office again. And we're going to have an in-office culture until we get this thing really dialed in.

It doesn't have to be seven days a week. It'll come in two days a week, three days a week. But we're going to start this process of really getting focused and setting some really tight goals. And here are the four goals. that we're going to crush this year to show the world that we're serious about making change here. Boom.

Not saying I would take the CEO a job. Not saying... Not saying anything. I'm not going to be the CEO of Twitter. Not a no. I mean, president. I don't know. But anyway, I'm not saying I would do it.

I'm not saying I wouldn't be qualified. There could be like a floor for lunch. Like, they're not going to need all the employees. So there could be an extra floor. Plenty more. A little area for launch. I can put that in there. I put a little inside area.

I'm not saying I can't multitask. Of course. I mean, they're running two companies now? Kind of, yeah. No problem. Easy peasy. All right. Let's go to the next story.

We'll wrap this up here. What else is in the news, Molly? Well, this news may surprise you. Let's pull up that headline again because what happened is that TikTok famous doctors are getting into NFTs and it's a. mess. I'm sorry. There are doctors on TikTok.

Yeah. Look, there they are. Want to do an NFT griff. Yeah. Okay. YouTube.com slash this weekend. So if I buy their NFT, I can go get plastic surgery with them. Is that where this is going?

So it's called. Please tell me, I didn't guess it. I don't know what this story is. This headline makes no sense to me. This headline is absolutely baffling. Nor does this business idea, basically. But they did create these NFTs of TikTok doctors. What they were supposed to do in the plainest English that our producers could come up with,

the project was called meta doc, M-E-T-A doc, you know. And these NFTs were supposed to give owners access to the doctors involved in the project, like a Web 3 concierge care situation. Okay, yeah, concierge doctor. I got one of those, yeah, sure. Holders would receive heart tokens for every day that they own the NFT. and then the tokens could be used for three tiers of doctor experiences, ranging from DMs to ask me anything, so teladoc appointments or video chats.

And then, of course, if you have one, you also can get discounts on apparel personal care items, medical tests, supplements, and more. Okay, I'm there. Metadocs founder, Dr. Sina Duraabchi, hopes it will evolve into a full-fledged virtual clinic in the so-called Metaverse, where patients can put on a haptic suit and be examined remotely by a physician in virtual reality.

like I have to be honest I don't hate that right so it's a grift disrupt doctors this is like less aggrift and more illegal oh well

from the treatment perspective because there are rules around telemedicine like a lot of rules around doctors and how they can operate and where they can operate they have to be licensed in each individual state

in which they're going to operate sure this is not a licensed telemedicine service. So doctors actually cannot legally use it to treat patients. If you have ever done an online appointment, actually doctors always call, like the teledocs call to ask where you're calling in before the doctor can come on. Doctors are then being removed from the project because they either didn't agree to participate, didn't feel comfortable with telling people they could treat them via

when they can't or because they have not completed their residency. In one case, a doctor had to be removed from the project after he left his hospital position. So it was actually no longer employed as a doctor. All right. So there are regulations in place for a reason. And as we've discussed with Theranos over and over again, there are places where you can, you know, move fast and break things. Please, medicine, don't do it there. You just have a higher duty and authority there. So I do like the idea of the NFTs for the fish frying club that we had on the pod Gary Vaynerchuk's

thing or Soho House or we're investors in one for music festivals and so I do think the NFT as a membership club after party by the way is the name of the one we invested and I'm not trying to promote them or anything but I thought

it was an interesting project run by people I know and they're credible, we'll have them on the pot at some point then we paid 10,000 for our two NFTs and we invested in the company The two $10,000 NFTs gives us four tickets every time they do one of these events. So we have eight tickets. I was going to give them to the producers here,

but nobody wanted to go to Vegas for it. Or they couldn't because I'm working them too hard. But theoretically, we could, it's kind of like buying Coachella tickets. So imagine you wanted to start a music festival. Instead of trying to raise money, you just make a club. And you're like, hey, thousand people spend $10,000 on these.

We have $10 million. Now we can produce music festival for the next 10 years and spend a million dollars on each. And then we could also sell additional tickets or let you resell or your thousand VIP passes that get you backstage or to the backstage area, whatever. There can be a backstage and another backstage. You know, it's just a really cool idea. But doing this for doctors, there's too many moving parts. You would have to really be thoughtful about this.

If you had 10 doctors who said, we're selling these to California residents and it includes an onboarding and you get, you know, 10 hours of telemedicine a year for the next 10 years. You really want to define this and make it through. So just be thoughtful. I mean, that's all. It's just about being thoughtful about these things. Music Festival is a different level of, you know, or a fried fish is different than this. NFTs as fly fishing club. Yeah, fly fish and chips.

I just, I hear, it's all my dyslexia. Which is awesome. I love fried, fried fish. I love, yeah, I'd be down for a fish and chips club. Yeah, I mean, the idea of NFTs as access. plus badge. Great. Fine.

You're a season ticket holder. You get some perks and you have a digital asset that serves as your badge of membership and honor and art. Cool. Love it. Don't even hate the idea of trying to apply that model to concierge care necessarily. But if people could die and there are a bunch of laws around how to do this. Yeah, I mean, it's just like, you know what? This is not ready.

It's not ready for fun. It's not ready. Well, then also are the NFTs appreciating in value and then based on what? So, you know, when you have a music festival, it's pretty obvious what you would base the valuation of these tickets. Who's performing? How much do, you know, what's the market for them? Does the mark, is their market demand?

So if you did and this turned into, you know, Coachella, over time, you could see people would be like a backstage pass. Coachella was $1,000. a lifetime backstage pass is worth 10,000 now. It could be worth 100,000 down the road, right? Yeah. As it gets bigger and bigger names play at it. Here, like, would it double in value because the doctor became more sought after?

I don't know. It just seems weird. Whereas, like, a popular club, like Soho House or Fly Fish, Fly Fishing Club, the fried fly fishing club, fly guy fishing, whatever it's called, would be... I'm starting a competitor called Fly Guy Fishing. I actually want to start one for poker. I've always wanted to start a private club for playing games like poker and backgammon, flyfish club.

I apologize. I'm making fun, but I do think that was like sincerely a brilliant idea. So I would like to start a poker club and I would have my own poker NFT grift. So if there's somebody out there who's passionate about poker and isn't too degenerate and can actually like work, I would hire you to do this for me. Basically, I sell, I could sell a thousand of these. I would sell them for $5,000, maybe $10,000 each.

And then it would include, that would be $10 million bucks. And we would create a location, which would be a private club where members could play cards in the Bay Area. And then maybe a second one somewhere else. And then we would have pop-up poker games, you know, at events around the world. Okay, that's a good name, Nick. don't say it on air. Oh, yeah. Keep workshop in that name.

That's good. That's good. That's good. I think I would work. Hey, I have people, nobody is in here. I think NFTs as membership. And then NFTs as pure sort of artistic expression.

A friend literally sold me on the NFT game on Easter Sunday. We were all, we were having brunch and she was talking about. And this is not a person who's like super techy. You know, she's sort of like, I don't really understand all this, but she's an artist.

and really made the case and is doing a super cool NFT project that I literally cannot wait to see and even buy. I was like, I love this. I love what you're creating. It's beautiful.

And it has this really meaningful aspect to it. But she was saying that what's so great about it for artists and for all these communities is that it is like, it's like when you could just create a blog and have all the expression you wanted on the internet. She's like, it's like the internet is fun again. Because there's things you can do as an artist with NFTs,

with metadata, an instant creation where you can create layers and then, you know, people put in certain attributes, it'll create a million versions of that. And they're all beautiful and they're super customized to you. She's like, it just as a playground is delightful. And I was like, well, hell. Yeah, now I like it. You know, it's the thing that's beautiful about crypto is this idea that you're

empowering people to participate in a more meaningful way in the creation of organizations. That's a very cool idea. Now, there's layers of grift on top of it and on professionalism and stupidity, you know, but the ownership nature of it is what we do with cap tables in technology all the time. So the more people can do that, the more I'm all in on it. I love the idea of more participation. Now, your ownership is really a membership. So keep that in mind. You don't own equity in the thing because we have securities law. And we talk to Brian Armstrong about that on the last all in that like there needs to be a framework for projects and I did the safe harbor one. I think my idea is the best because I've really thought about and talked to a lot of people,

which is there should be a tiered safe harbor. So any project under $10 million and under $10,000 maximum investment should be safe harbored. What that means is you can do whatever project you want. You just have to have one person's name. It has to be incorporated. You need to have some basic insurance or something. whatever, just like a basic amount, but you don't have to worry about accreditation or whatever

because the max damage you can do is 10,000 and somebody is in charge of it, and it's incorporated in Delaware or somewhere in the United States, right? Okay. Now, it's between 10 and 100 million. You need to have a board of directors, and you need to have KYC. No, your customer.

Thank you. And you can do anybody with $10,000 max investment is fine, anybody above 10,000 has to be accredited. So now, okay, yeah. So somebody who's a truck driver or a teacher could get swindled, but the max they could get swindled out of is $10,000. It's not going to destroy their life forever.

It's a hole you could dig yourself out of. If it is, don't be playing. Right. And if it is, you shouldn't be playing. Because, like, people do take $10,000 who are truck drivers or teachers and go to Vegas and blow it. Like, this happens every day in Vegas. So you're basically.

say, like, we'll put a cap on it. And then anybody who's running those things is like, great. So if that person does choose to sue me for whatever reason, the max damages is 10. The average investment at the syndicate.com, and this is of accredited investors, is about $7,000. What I love about this in terms of my exposure as the person running the syndicate and you as well, and we have insurance and these are accredited investors. They know what they're doing. There has never been a lawsuit over syndicates. Like, there's been zero. I know of one instance where somebody, um, three, threatened and it was on one of the platforms and it like there was no case to be had so it was

just went away but what's the damage if the average is seven thousand dollars if somebody really felt like they were damaged in some way what is the legal you to spend a 500,000 suing somebody for seven thousand dollars is just like you would just suck it up and like take the loss just like somebody who played in a rig poker game and lost seven thousand dollars might just stuck it up and take the loss. So that's really what has to happen with crypto. I also think with private company investing, just cap the amount that people can lose,

and then they still get to participate, but there's a cap. That's all. It's very simple. And there's no caps in Vegas, by the way. You can go there and mortgage your whole house and show up and blow it playing roulette in an hour. One spin.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So anyway, yes. No NFGs for healthcare. Not yet. Not ready for. No NFTs for healthcare. All right. One of the things that happened during the pandemic was virtual events.

And one of the companies, perhaps the leading one, was a UK-based platform called Hopin, H-O-P-I-N. I know about this. I was able, we considered using it for the events over at inside.com when we started doing virtual events. And here at launch, we have remote demo day. I looked at all these platforms. They were very expensive if you're doing a free event. probably not a great thing for you to use because they would charge you $50,000 a year or per person. And so we went with Zoom plus Slack

basically close to free solution that is flat rate for the year. Anyway, Hoppin was very interesting product and service, but they got an incredible valuation. Just look at this valuation. And incredible amounts of incredible literal dollars too.

So they're Series A, they got up to $7.8 billion. But look at the ramp up here. The ramp up is insane. The ramp up is insane. The ramp up is insane. Lost their mind. And apparently, again,

thought the pandemic would never end. This will be the status quo forever. So they put in $40 million in June of 2020. That's a series A at a $244 million dollar valuation. A billion. By December, the series B was $230 million at a one and a half billion dollar valuation. Six months later, the valuation went five X.

No, six X. Six X. Then you get to March. Okay, March. And you got a series C. Of the next year. Of the next year. January February, March, four months later.

Four months later. Okay. How much did it go up? $414 million raised at a $5.8 billion dollar valuation. Wait a second. The valuation goes up $4 billion dollars in four months, a billion dollars a month. They're doing great. It went up a billion.

dollars a month. Okay. At this point, by the way, A16 is in. They're like, FOMO galore. So what we're saying is the company was a quarter billion dollar company in June, and then less than a year later, nine months later, it was worth $6 billion almost. So that would be for 22 or 23X in nine months. Okay, that defies gravity.

There's no way that actually makes any sense. but okay, let's continue. But it keeps going. July of 2021, they raised the series D, which is $460 million at an $8 billion valuation by Altimeter and arena holding. So March, yeah, April, May, June, July, for more months, they go up another $2.2 billion.

All right. So growth is slowing at this point. I mean, the valuation's only going up half a billion a month. We need to know the revenue of this company to really make a judge. call here, but to be worth $8 billion, $8 billion, I would expect, let's

see, 50... You guess because I know the answer. Oh, you do know the answer, okay. It's in our notes, but... Okay, don't peep. You know the actual revenue. I'm not peaking. So, okay, I will tell you what reality would be. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Okay, in an absurdly hot market, 100 times top line revenue

would be $8 million would be 800 million. So 80 million would be 8 billion. That would be an absurd peak peak market. So 80 million would equal that. Now, if it was 50x, you'd have to have 40 million in, no, no, 160 million. Yeah, let me just do the quick back of the envelope map here.

160, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 8 billion, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, divided by that. Yeah, that's 50 times, yeah. So 1 point, 160 million would be 50 times top line. That's what I would put it at. So you'd think the revenue should be at 160 million a year? A year to get there. Well, according to a financial time source, Hopin generated over $100 million in ARR in 2021, but 30 million or so came from their acquisition of Stream Yard, which is a streaming service like research.

So likely, so really what it comes down to is likely closer to $70 million, ARR. Okay. So it was trading out 100 times, which was crazy peak valuation. Makes no sense. And then the question is, are any of those customers who make up that 70 million in revenue? So this obviously had pretty fast revenue. Are any of those customers sticking around post-pandemic?

And I think some will because online events, I think, are not going to go away. The interesting thing here, so anyway, this is absurd peak market, but it was probably growing up such a fast clip. The crazy thing here, according to the F2. research, Hoppin's CEO, Johnny Bufrat, cashed out $195 million in secondary securing the bag in a two-year-old company. This is a fast revenue growth for a company of the size, just so we're clear. So as crazy as this one seems, it's probably too X as crazy as it should be, but it's not

that crazy. It's not unheard of. I mean, they were making money and the revenue was growing really quickly. However, now you are in a scenario where the CEO's, sold almost $200 million of his own shares. And as of two days ago on the Financial Times, there were sub-500 events listed on the platform representing a 97% decrease.

Okay. In the number of events listed on Hopin, the company in February laid off about 12% of its staff. Sounds wise. And they say they have plenty of runway. Yeah, I would think so. Which I would imagine. Now, the question is, can they ever get,

back up to this valuation. Because now the company would be worth 30 times revenue. So in order to be worth $8 billion, 20 times, you're probably got to get to $300,000, $500 million in revenue to build into that valuation again. If they had $500 million in revenue, would they be worth $8 billion as a public company? Maybe.

Maybe. Maybe they would need to have more. So I think that's going to be the question. And then also, how profitable is the company? Does this have an 80% margin or 50% margin? I don't know the total number of employees. If I did, I might be able to give you, back into their cost structure.

So how many employees got laid off? 138 would be 12%. So if you times that by 8, approximately you would get the number of employees. So if we were to do back of the envelope, math 138 times

8 would be 1100 employees. 1,100 employees times an average employee costs of 100 and put out 100,000. Who knows what level of employee they have. They are spending $110 million a year, so they might even be getting

close to break-even. So laying off 10% of the that 12% of the staff would actually get them probably, you know, who knows what they're spending on service in marketing as well. So they might be actually within spitting distance of being break-even. It could be. And this is why math is important. Because when I saw Altimiter on there, I'm good friends with Brad Gershner. He tends to be very smart and considered.

And so that would be my signal to maybe when he did that $8 billion evaluations to think, hmm, is this insanity like Clubhouse? Because Clubhouse was $4 billion with no revenue. Okay. Well, here's a SaaS company. Right. And this is why SaaS companies are a safer bet because there's actual revenue and it's reoccurring.

So even if they lost, like for a SaaS company to lose 30% of its revenue year over year would be unheard of. It would have to really be some crazy situation like the pandemic ending or like a competitor giving the product away for free, but even then, people would have to take the time to cancel a 40K. I think these, they're probably the average customer, I don't know,

I'm guessing here, because I know that we quoted out all of these air meat, hop, and we looked at all of them. And they were way too expensive. They were quoting us like 50 grand, $100,000 a year to have like, you know,

up to 3,000 people on our events or whatever. And there was just too much usage charges to make it worth it. So I think there's a model here for somebody to do a flat rate and just undercut all these folks, because you could build this with open, source chat and open, this is the easiest software in the world to make. You just take Zoom. I think Zoom will own this business eventually. God bless you. If you did sneeze. And I don't know why Zoom. I did. Thank you. I don't know why Zoom doesn't already.

I think Zoom is kind of dancing around this. They have the webinars, which is what we pay for. And I think the webinar product, we can have a couple of thousand people and it costs us like $1,000 a year or something. It's really affordable. You don't have multiple stages and a calendar around it with an area for networking and an area for trade shows. And so I really would love to see somebody make a more affordable version of this. I actually consider it just rolling our own, which I do see some people are doing and building wrappers around it. But yeah, somebody tell me what the Zoom says.

I can't see it. When you pull up these things. Zoom events and webinar, 690 a year for up to 500 attendees. And then within events platform, 890 a year. Yeah. So I think this will be Zoom's business. So if Zoom could make it So when you show up for the event, Molly,

you have, here are the tracks and then here's a chat room for each talk. Yep. You know, like, and then here's a trade show area. That's really what you need is the trade show area. Love, love, love, love hybrid events, right? Keep doing hybrid events. I think there's no...

We have one, Meet Ourfund.com, which we're doing our third one of, where funds pitch founders and we had like 10,000 people, I know, maybe 8,000 people signed up for it, and then a lot of people watch the videos after, but you get hundreds of people watching it. I really would like to have more networking space

for the sponsors and stuff like that. So I was looking for a solution. But yes, hybrid is the way to go. And I want to do it, Meet Our Fun 4 will be live and virtual. Love it. I love that. And honestly, as an environmental play, like not everybody needs to fly everywhere.

So if you give hybrid events and then you can create like an offset program for the people who don't come, I don't know. I just think there's a lot of potential there. Two prices. It makes a lot of sense. And it does seem like, in this case, the valuation was bonkers. It seems to have now, at least according to the secondary sales, according to the financial times in February, the hop-in shares fell 41% on a secondary marketplace.

And from their most recent valuation, that would be a $3.3 billion reduction, which doesn't seem unreasonable. I think that's exactly what we just did back of the envelope. Right, exactly. He was like cut it in half. You came up with the same thing. Cut it in half. Perfect.

Here's the good news. The founder knows what he's doing, apparently. he made the cuts, he didn't need to, and he's going to have to just put his head down for two years and build into the valuation, he probably can. I think the issue he's going to now that he's sitting on 200 million. Well, personally, the reason I don't like the $200 million pay out for him is, is he going to come to work for the next two years?

You have to wonder. Yeah. Or is he going to hand you off to somebody? I would say a good rule of them is, hey, maybe the founders can cash out up to 25% of the current revenue of the company. Companies out 100 million, you could cash out 25. And then also the other employees who've been there for over two years. Now, this is a two-year-old company, so there's nothing to do it.

But, you know, listen, the people who are doing these deals, they went in. They're very sophisticated investors. There's nobody more sophisticated than Altimiter. Shout out, Brad Gershner. So if Brad was involved in that secondary show, whatever, maybe they did that to win the deal. Maybe it was a hot competitive deal. And I don't like those payoffs when they do it. I'll ask Brad next time I see him what the story is and I'll report back.

But, you know, it was a hot moment in time. It was a hot deal apparently. And so people would sometimes basically the most cynical way to look at it is bribe the founder to take their deal. And the more charitable way to look at it is they got to buy more shares in a company they like. And the founder got to benefit from his or her creation. And the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I don't like tying financings to secondaries. I think that should be split as the best hygiene practice.

Because imagine you're an investor in the company at the $250 million round. Now the company has an offer. One offers for $8 billion, once for nine. The one with $8 billion comes with $200 for the founder. The one with $9 doesn't. Or there's an offer that has more controls, you know, better governance. Well, now the founder is going to pick because of the government. God King and God Queen nature of how companies are run now, they're going to pick what's in their

best interest or all shareholders' best interest? So where does that leave the employees? Should the employees be able to cash out too? Yeah. You know, and so these things are fraught with governance issues and incentive issues. And I think people have to be thoughtful about it, but it's a free market. So deal with it. I have to deal with it all the time.

It's a free market out there and I deal with it all the time and I have conversations with founders. Usually my conversation with founders, if I'm being honest, is, are you taking any chips off the table? And I've had many founders say, no, I want to buy more. And I'm like, do you own your home? And they're like, no, I rent. And I'm like, are you independently wealthy with a trust fund? No, my parents weren't rich. My dad was, you know, a lawyer. My mom was a nurse. No, we, I'm not. And I'm like, okay, perhaps, you own $100 million in shares in this company. You, you own $100 million, dollars in shares in this company, you own 30% of it's worth 300 million. What do we think about you selling 5 million, 4 million?

You pay your taxes and you put a down payment on a house or you buy a house if you're in Austin or you put a down payment on a house if you're in the Bay Area. Austin is not that cheap, first of all, but second. Well, you could buy a million dollars. Trust me, I've been looking every day. Well, this is what you said in the book, right? There's like you let them sell, there's an amount that's sort of comfort money. Yes.

And then there's an amount that's FU money. Yeah, when you get to, this is, this is beyond FU money. This is like everything. This is, I'm going to buy Twitter money. Just kidding. Well, it's, I was about to say, this is I'm going to go buy a restaurant, a hotel, and an airplane money. And I've seen this happen.

Like, I've seen founders go buy it, spend like literally three months picking their plane, two months picking their house in Kauai, three months going into some stupid restaurant venture. And then all of a sudden, their phone's ringing because their pilots, want to raise the plane went on fire in the hangar the chef quit there's a lawsuit uh with their land because the neighbors they're building too much and all of a sudden found a distraction yeah trust me i just bought my first second home and like there's a little much work i mean literally yeah it you know it's complexity that you dialed in at your primary home your internet your TVs

your insurance water you know whatever it's just all happens a second time you know you know, and you're a homeowner, you understand what you have to go through with your current home. Nightmare. God. It's like double the nightmare. Now I know people who've done this who've got triple the nightmare. All right, listen, this has been a great episode. Congratulations to the Hop and founder investors.

I think you have a real business. Don't worry about the reduction in value of your company. Just put your head down and build the world's greatest product. And for competitors, you could build a competing product to this. And the roadmap is, you know, make it flat rate. Flat rate because I need a flat rate solution. So selfishly, if somebody could build a competing product to this. me a flat rate solution for $1,000 a year, that let me run my conferences on it, I would do it.

Or if somebody wants to give me a five-year deal for a flat rate on one of these aerometer hop in for a really cheap price, I'll do a barter with you for some ads on the show. I'm so glad we did this story, by the way, because this is a, I'm just so glad we did this story and we're able to unpack the narrative with math because that was, I think, really valuable. Well, it's also really, valuable to look at

it's easier for you to do right now, Molly, because you're on the other side of the table and you see the insides of these businesses, you know, how this stuff works now in month four. You've,

you know, basically in four months, you've got 60% of the knowledge of investing, you know, and then it's basically going to be... I'm just working on the math now. Well, I mean,

I think there's a quick rank, like any other skill, like if you want to learn podcasting, you can probably learn 60, 70% in your first year. And then to get the last 30%, you know,

it's like you're going to learn whatever, 10% the next year, whatever, 20% the next year, and then 5% the year after that. And then it's just harder to get those last, you know, how to hit a half-course shot. You know, how to be elite. It's like the Bugatti. It takes like 100 horsepower or something to get to 200 or 150. And then it takes all the rest of the horsepower to get from 100 to 200. Yes.

Or some crazy thing like that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's more effort to get the last little things. All right, everybody. It's been an amazing episode. here's some things you can do to support the show. Go to YouTube.com slash this weekend.

Hit subscribe, ring the bell, and then we give you, you get to join us every day here. Number two, you can write a review of the show, rated on Spotify or iTunes. Number three, you can thank the sponsors. You can CC at Mollywood, at Jason. When you do that, or you can just go visit their URLs and use their products and support them

for supporting us. And if you really want to go next level, producers at this week in Startups.com, we live in the future, segment where we talk about things that are crazy and new in the world or startup of the day. Just tip us off.

And then if you hear somebody on another podcast, like, you know, there's a lot of boutique podcasts out there and you hear somebody who's a great guest, always on the lookout for somebody who is really intelligent, really well-spoken. A lot of the great folks you know in the industry today started here on this program, Travis, Saka, Chimoth, Keith Rabeoi, Glenn from Redfin.

A lot of them started here on This Weekend Startups 10 years ago, seven years ago. We had them on a couple of times. And then they became just great podcasters themselves like Chamoth or regulars on other people's podcasts like Raboy. And they were less known at that time or totally unknown in some cases. And so we like to discover those people and then have them on on a regular basis. We like to build those characters, if you will, and those personalities.

So if you find somebody like that, please do send them all away. Anything else you can do to support the show, Molly? I mean, keep coming out. Keep coming out. Leave us those reviews on iTunes, like help juice those ratings. That helps.

But really, just keep talking to us. It's the best. Like we said we watch the chat every day and it basically is like hanging out with our friends and that's the best part of this job. It is the best part of the show. It is the Noddy Gang, 10 a.m. Most days.

Pacific time. Well, sometimes we can get a job. interrupted by breaking news or whatever, but yeah, that's why you hit the bell, you ring the bell. Exactly, because then we have to go live because Elon again, like we did yesterday. And tomorrow we'll play everybody's favorite game show. What should Elon buy next? I just came up with that idea. Oh my God. What are Elon and Jeff Bezos? Buy next on tomorrow's show. We'll see you next time. Bye bye. Thanks, producers. Great job. producers.

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