This Week in Startups - Meta's paid tier, Bing's chatbot gone wild, Stripe's $4B bill | E1681

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

First up, J+M break down Meta taking a note from Twitter with a $12 paid tier and how it can have a material impact on revenue. (12:05) Then, they cover the problems with Bing's new chatbot (32:13) before wrapping on Stripe potentially missing its window (46:14) and Meta copying a Telegram feature! (1:00:30) (0:00) J+M tee up today's topics! (2:22) Proper PTO operating standards, what's in store for the next few weeks on TWiST! (10:31) MasterClass - Get 15% off an annual membership at https://masterclass.com/startups (12:05) Zuck announces Meta Verified, a $12/month paid service for Facebook/Instagram and WhatsApp (18:56) How Meta's new product can have a material impact on revenue (21:49) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist  (22:47) What enticing features major social platforms can add to get more paid users (30:42) Contra - Get $500 off your first hire at https://contra.com/twist (32:13) Bing's new chatbot has already been toned down by Microsoft for responding with a style the company did not intend (46:14) Stripe's $4B tax bill and further valuation cuts: did the highest-flying startup fumble the bag? (1:00:30) Meta also copied Telegram's broadcast channels feature, which Zuck used to announce Meta's new paid tier! FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1

Okay, everybody. It is Monday. It is Monday. And it is like, soak in the J-Cal in this episode. Because it's his last news show. There will be plenty of interviews featuring Jason over the next couple of weeks. But you're off to Japan. I'm big in Japan. Love it.

Big in Japan. Huge. But so much news. Zuck has copied two features. He's doing Twitter verified and he's doing telegram channels. inside of the meta collection of assets. So Mimetic Mark is at it again. Yep. What do we think?

We'll launch a poll in our new Instagram channel and see what you think of Mimetic Mark. We're trying on a new... Jason's trying out a new nickname here. We're also... We're going to geek out a tiny bit about large language learning models. Talk about Bing's chatbot

going off the rails last week. Why this is happening, why it might or might not matter, why it makes the people look worse than the computers in some cases. Lots to talk about in terms of chat. I was also playing with Cora's new Po, which is amazing. And Neva.

So I have my ranking now. And I will share my ranking shortly, but I am going to rank all of these, maybe in a blog post on my substack or something. Anyway, then we talk about Stripe. They did not get out to go public. They got a ton of RSUs, restricted stock units they have to deal with. We'll talk about why they may have missed their window to go public and why they need to get this. resolved. AsAP. It is going to be a great show.

So stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Masterclass. Learn from the world's best minds. Anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace. Get 15% off an annual membership to Masterclass at masterclass. At masterclass.com slash startups. 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. And Contra is a commission-free marketplace for freelancers and independent creators. Get $500 off your first hire at contra.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome to Monday. It is President's Day, but we're still producing here. We do the floating holidays at our company. Can't stop, won't stop.

Yeah, can't stop, won't stop. But we do the floating holiday thing, although I don't want to get into the whole, how difficult it is to be a boss, Molly, in the age of cancer culture, floating holidays, and everybody's got a favorite. You know, like, I don't, did you have St. Pats and Columbus Day off when you were growing up in, uh, same past? No, although we would occasionally, as you might imagine. in the heavily, let's just say, heavily concentrated Christianity zone. We would occasionally get Good Friday off.

Yeah, Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday, Good Friday. No St. Patrick's Day, definitely Columbus Day, which I think is still, that's still a school holiday, but now it's Indigenous People's Day, at least in the Bay Area. It's really like, it's such a third way. I don't think they call it Columbus Day anywhere. I mean, I really like, I mean, to pull things back. Oh, do they?

well. Oh, you haven't been to Hoboken. Oh, no, in New York, there's like an entire, there is an entire Sopranos season thread on Columbus Day and Columbus Day and everything. When I lived in New York, Columbus Day versus St. Patrick's Day versus the Puerto Rican Day parade. They didn't have a name for the day. It was just the Puerto Rican Day parade name. This was like the battle of all battles. Who gets the day off for high school? And we were severance. So obviously Italians and Irish and Catholics would get the first choice. But things have changed.

And there are 20 possible holidays. I like the... It seems like I like the... We're going to say the British style or the... I like the European style where they call it a bank holiday. Just a bank holiday. They're like sometimes because people need to rest or whatever, we have three-day weekends and we call them a bank holiday and we don't...

Because like once you attach your feelings to it is when I guess apparently it gets messy. I would go with that actually since we're a finance company primarily. So that would be one way to look at. at it is we take the bank holidays. But we chose to take MLK Day in June 19th off. There was big debates about that. And I was like, you know what? I think the Irish and the Catholic got enough days off. I think we could probably spread it around a little bit. It is such a controversial topic. And yeah, I, but we're here. So we're here. We're here. To be fair, it is a bank holiday today. But we're here, though. We're here. There are. And there's still news happening.

six, seven, eight, nine, ten. There's 11 bank holidays. Marroth. There's very, people are in startup companies too, this is becoming, and with remote work, this is becoming like a big, how do we do this going forward? And should labor get to pick which days they take off? Or should management? Or should it be some combo?

And I think that's really what you have to get to bring this back to startups is I, when I was running under 15 person companies, I said, listen, these are the six days we're going to take off. You pick the rest of your floating holidays, pick four more. These are your pay time off. There's no delineation between a vacation day, personal day, a sick day, sick child day, whatever day you want to come up with, a mental health day. Like, all these days got added. I was told by HR expert, just give people a certain amount of paid time off. You know what happens when you do this, floating holidays and pay time off?

there's some young person who comes in. And they just get really upset. Oh, you're not taking off Columbus Day, this day, that day, that day. Oh, we don't get sick days. It's like, no, we just don't, you get that time. We just, we don't call it a sick day because, you know the game. I'm going to go to Japan. I'm taking five days off.

And then the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, we're supposed to be at work. I'm going to magically get sick on Monday. Have a personal day Tuesday. And I get sick again on Wednesday to extend my holiday. That's what you had to do in the 90s, just so you know. Oh, yeah. had to pretend that you got sick on the day back from your holiday. Remember those discussions at your boss?

It was a whole dance. Absolutely. It was a whole dance. It is really interesting, though, because it is a thing that you will have to face as a founder once your company gets, once you have employees, once your company gets to a certain size. I mean, there's a point at which when you're a founder, you don't, there's none. There is no weekend. There's no holiday. You do not know what day it is.

You know, like, every time I talk to a founder on a Friday, I'll be like, happy Friday. and they're like, who? What? I'm sorry? Day, time. It's all a blur. Is it a day that ends and why? Because I'm working.

And, you know, and often, so are we, like, if it's when they can talk, that's when we talk or whatever. But, like, it is a really interesting kind of company formation question. Maybe we should start including that in our, like, accelerator. Or, you know, it sort of is like, are there best practices for how you even decide? You know, it's like, and then the unlimited thing came up, but then nobody. approved anything. I just think to make things easy, standardization is good. Some level of standardization is good so people can know what to expect. And then people want to change it. The other thing I like is when everybody takes time off at the same time. And we had a small company.

We say, hey, company shut down between these days. These are holidays. Use a couple of vacation days, but we're going to close the 23rd to the second. Just nobody do email as a group. There's four or five holidays in there. There's three or four weekend days. And there's, you got to take three days off using your days, your vacation is. And of course, there's always somebody who's like, I want to work those three days. I'm like, you want to work New Year's Eve or, you know, the day after Christmas or something? And they're like, yeah, it's not a holiday. I'm like, really, you want to work?

You're going to be the only person in Slack it on email. And they're like, yeah. So. Yeah, but there's work that doesn't involve Slack and email. Like, you can get a lot done. Those days are, no, those are the best days. Those are the, those are like the be creative,

make a plan, set your goals for the, like, those are like good work days. Because nobody's emailing you. The days when nobody is slacking. You remember when I did my like, I guess it depends if you're collaborating or not.

I did that one digital nomad trip or whatever and worked in a place that was not my house but was not an office where I like could talk to people or whatever. I went to Julian. Julian California. Adorable. It's like high country. It's outside the Anzo Bariga.

It's like an hour due east of San Diego. think. Got it. Cool little town. Everything's called the Julian whatever, like the Julian Pie Company and the Julian

I'm looking at it right now. Anyway, I could not believe how productive I was. Like, it was astonishing. Because there was like no one to talk to,

but also no chores. I mean, I went with my friend, but she was working too. We were in two sides of the house. Just crushing it. There's something about changing the location

and getting focused. I'm looking forward to my Japan trip. I'm going to Japan tomorrow. Everybody, we got an amazing number of episodes. Holy crap. You got some really heavy hitters. just give one name.

General Frank Slutman back on the program and it is nuts. It's nuts. Like he's just so good. Jason was like 45 seconds late to that interview and producer Nick was like, he's going to kill me. Please. He was looking at me funny.

I was like, Jason, please hurry. I was like, yeah, you can't keep him waiting. No, Slutman, it was great because I'm literally going back to my notes on his book, jumping around the audio book, jumping around other interviews he's done before or after my last interview with him, and looking at my notes. And I just started writing down all this things. And it really inspired me just to think about the two organizations I run

and just operational efficiency and really just thinking about that energy-based culture. I think the number one thing that I got from him was he's really into keeping the energy level high, keeping people, you know, on a fast pace. And I think that's critically important in, you know, competitive companies. Or if you want to be competitive, but yeah. Speaking about competitive companies. Yeah. Let's get into it.

They listen a lot more when you lose. And so be smart about your delivery and what you're saying. But it can be an extremely important moment in your relationship. with your team and a trajectory of your organization. All right. That was the voice of Mike Chashefsky. You know Coach K, the winningest coach in NCAA men's basketball history. And his point about leadership mattering more in hard times is so accurate in my experience

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That's masterclass. com slash startups for 15% off masterclass. Let's get into it. He's sharpening the sword, isn't he? He really is. So Zuck is his latest feature that he is going to copy. And frankly, can I just start by saying, what a missed opportunity.

Meta is now going to let users pay $12 a month or $15 on iOS for Meta verified. And the missed opportunity is not to call it Meta Blue because I'm sorry, if you're going to copy it, Meta Blue sounds so much cooler. It's got some like internal alliteration. Like I love it. But anyway, if you pay for Meta Verified, you will get a blue checkmark, which is why I'm saying, go ahead and call it that. You will get direct access to customer support, account verification with a government ID that gives you extra impersonation protection. The announcement did not

mention any extra data privacy protections, but there's been a lot of speculation, of course, about why meta might be rolling out a paid product. Yeah, I had been talking about this for well over a decade that it would just be the right thing to do to have a subscription-based social network. I had two reasons for this. One is to take away ads if you're not and being tracked, if you're not into it. And the other is to build up trust and ownership. When people use their real names, not in all cases, right?

We've seen people who use their real names who are horrible human beings. Yep. But generally speaking. Some of those rails have come off since the first time you proposed this. it is certainly the case that there are people who have no problem being horrible humans, whatever, A-holes, whatever, D-bags, with their actual real name. That exists. But I would say broadly, somebody creating 20 brigadooning bot accounts that can exist in a social network where people use real names. Now, Facebook's always been real names, but this is real name verified.

So this for them is like even making it sharper, you know? And since it's opt in, you don't have to do it. You still have to use your real name on Facebook. Instagram, you don't have to use your real name. You could have a, you know, like history and pictures kind of account. I think. I think that's true. It is interesting how it's an exact copy of what Elon is doing over Twitter.

Like down to the price difference if you buy it through iOS or you go direct, right? Right. That extra three bucks or whatever. It's just a little more expensive. Great. It's interesting for a lot of reasons. One, that I suspect that this is an attempt to test out. So normally, I'm going to dispense with being delicate here.

Normally when Zuck copies a feature, it's because that feature is wildly successful, which so far does not seem to have been the case with Twitter Blue in terms of adoption. However, I think what you see here is sort of a, a double experiment going on because we're at a time when Apple's privacy changes, we know, have cost Facebook, have cost meta, a lot of money. So there's probably an attempt going on here to recoup lost revenue as a result of these privacy changes. It's gotten a lot harder to reach customers.

And there are questions about the efficacy of ads on the platform. So they're probably looking at the Twitter blue thing and going like, well, some number signed up. Maybe that will replace some of this lost revenue and or give us a pathway forward because they also seem to be signaling that they might expect more privacy crackdowns that could hurt the digital ad business. Like, I don't think it's a surprise that this is coming right after the DOJ's Google antitrust announcement.

Ah, that's interesting to put those two things together, yeah. And you and producer Rachel talked a little bit about the selling of databases the other week. I wasn't on that episode, but I listened to it. And you were talking about, hey, they were selling like, hey, here's a list of people who, you know, have depression medications or this medication or that medication. There's a lot of scrutiny coming. And we tend to trail what happens in the EU. The EU's tightened things up. So it's a new revenue stream. It'll make the service better. And I think what's happening here is, you know, Zuckerberg's never viewed Twitter as competition, really. Yeah. They were kind of like, as he called at the clown car that drove into a diamond mind.

I think was his quote. Interesting. Very different. But very different products, right? Very different products. But even still, there are social networks where people share content with each other. And he is now responding to users and engaging, which obviously is one of Elon's superpowers. And so here you see he, somebody's like, oh, this should be part of the clear this person, Mark was like, this really should just be part of the core product. Users should not have to pay for this. Clearly, it's known by meta, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And Mark Zuckerberg is like, we already provide protections and some support for everyone. But verifying government IDs and providing direct access to customer support for millions or billions of people cost a significant amount of money. Social fees will cover this and also will also pace how many people sign up so we'll be able to ensure quality as we scale. And then somebody's challenging pay it's $1404. But I have not seen Zuck mix it up with like customers. So I think this is a new era where people are going to start taking ownership. I would like to see them take ownership of the fact that young women are suffering from depression, anxiety, feelings of hopelessness at a rate to us. text than before social media and phones existed. And I think it's time that we have the discussion

of what is the appropriate age. I bought my daughter and I watch this weekend, an Apple Watch, sorry. Not a phone, but she's 13. I got her to watch to start to do text so we know where she is because she's going on a field trip, et cetera, and we want to stay in touch. I think we have discussed what age is the right age for social media. I think the age is 16. Some people might say 13, but I think we should pass legislation, have a thoughtful discussion about all social media being banned until you're 16 years old. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think it is a, it was a huge fight. We've done it with cigarettes. We've done it with alcohol. We do it with voting. Like, we do it with driving. Yep. And unquestionably, I think this, we're starting

to see the possibility that there is as much harm here as there is with those products. And we also know that in the case of META, for example, it has specifically been designed to addict. They've all been designed to be. You put a like button, you put follow-attel cigarettes. And every time, you know, and then it's like, you should take that away. And this sort of this artificial cottage industry has been built up around getting those likes. And it is without a doubt dangerous. Let's do a little, though, I'm kind of curious about the back of the envelope math, about if you imagine that META is trying to do this to recoup lost revenue as a result of its privacy, the privacy changes.

Like, if you are, when they were talking about Libra, I wrote, you know, that remember briefly, for those who do not recall, Facebook was trying to do a cryptocurrency called Libra. And I wrote a piece that did a little back of the envelope math before I even knew there was a name for it that pointed out that even like when Facebook rolls out something that is considered a failure, it could still have as much adoption as the US dollar, right? at least in terms of the U.S., like a tiny number, like 1%, right, would be 300 million users.

When you have over a billion users on these services, small percentages, when you hit hundreds of millions to billions, small percentages equals big money. Right. Because I think what we all realize. So if they have 3 billion users and Zuck can convert just 1% of those monthly active users, are they at 3 billion?

Yeah, dude. 2.96 billion just on Facebook. And then what's on Instagram? I thought they were at two also, and then Nick corrected me earlier this morning. That's active. Now, Facebook's monthly active user numbers are always in question. Debate, if you will, by advertisers. However, let's say that that's real.

Then they convert one. Plus or minus 10%. Let's say they convert 1%. They are replacing $360 million a month in extra revenue or $4.3 billion a year in incremental revenue with basically 100% margins. And when we look back at the amount that they lost as a result of the Apple iOS privacy changes, it was a few billion dollars.

It could just be as simple as a one-to-one. They just put it back. It could be simple as one-to-one. They're cutting costs. They're going to get more efficient. They're going to be using more AI to manage the business, more machine learning, right? So there are ways to, if we look at earnings,

the profitability of a business, which is ultimately what's, the stock market and business is valued on is the profitability. He's cutting people. He says managers, managing managers is no longer going to happen here. Please quit. I mean, we challenged the management class at Facebook, public, not publicly, in a meeting that became public, which means he leaked it, or told somebody to leak it. Yeah. That's how this works, folks. That means he expects to lower costs and increase revenue. And it's going to be the greatest J-trade of all time. I think. I'm going to triple my money on that in two years. I think it's literally going to go from 95 to

250, 300. Yeah. And if you've got the Metaverse losing $15 billion a quarter and you're like, well, we just put back almost $5 billion a year and just people who are willing to pay. And again, that's assuming one percent of them do it. And it might be more. If you're a SaaS or services company that stores customer data in the cloud, you need to be sock to compliant from a third party to close big deals. And you need to use Vanta if you want to do this quickly and easily. Vanta It makes it incredibly easy to get and renew your SOC2. On average, Vanta customers are SOC2 compliant in just two to four weeks, compared to three to five months without VANTA.

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for $1,000 off your SOC2. Well, and this is the first. So what if there's a second layer, which is, hey, for a corporate account to cross always. God. Well, yeah, I mean, he could, this is, you know, for 12 bucks.

But, okay, let's say he makes it $25 for no, ads privacy plus you get a bunch of analytic features and some other professional business related features. It's a fairly no-brainer. The LinkedIn professional, I think, is $30 a month. And I didn't know this. But like half the people at Inside were paying for it, another group of people that launched for salespeople or recruiting people were paying for it.

And they're like, yeah, it's only $300 a year. And it, you know, if you have LinkedIn Pro, you know, we can get another, we can DM people in mail, fine customers. It pays for itself like in week one. So I think there's a lot more he could turn over. There could be three layers, four layers of, four tiers here. A corporate tier is another one. Why should somebody with, you know, Pepsi or whatever, they should be paying, you know, $10,000 a month for their collective accounts. And you saw that on Twitter. I was, you know, involved in some of the meetings about this with David Sachs and Elon. If you look at my profile, it has an all-in icon next to it.

If you look at Mark Andreessen, it has an A16Z. Now, pull up, Nick, if you will, the Twitter handle for All In. I think there's like five handles that have this. So this is very early days, but it's been public so I can talk about it. And what you'll see, nobody's noticed this, but I'll make the announcement here, make it three times bigger. You see it says tweets. Oh, yeah, look at that. Affiliates.

Tweets and replies, etc. You see that affiliates? When you click on affiliates, it shows the four besties. I don't know why producer Nick didn't get in there, but he should. So now imagine you're the New York Times. Now imagine your Pepsi. Now imagine your NYU. Instead of saying affiliates, that's just a word.

You're going to be able to change that word. So we could say here, when you go to the NYU, it could say professors. It could say graduate programs. And it could say undergrad resources, whatever. Or I could say undergrads. You go and it's like, here's the different schools we. have here. So NYU Stern or you know, UCLA,

whatever, USC this, that, the other thing, they're going to have that. Now, what is that worth? What is it worth to be able to navigate on the NYU, Disney page, whatever? You're on the Star Wars page and you see affiliates or it says characters where it says movies. So now you go to characters and it shows you

Ant Man and Hulk. Then you go to movies it shows you those. Then it says merch, right? I mean, the possibilities here for a social network to then get revenue from direct payments from companies. is going to be just next level. I mean, it is really true, if you think about it, that these platforms became the most,

you could pay to advertise, but you didn't have to, right? It's almost like an evolution of the creator economy. Like, once brands realize, oh, you just set up like a really sassy brand Twitter account and you get free access to all of these people. Or you use Facebook really effectively, even minus ads,

and you can sort of freely promote your thing. This is going to make it sound more loaded than it is, but it reminds me of the old days of net neutrality. Do you remember it was like that guy, Ed Whitaker from SEC Global or whatever? It was like a little 18. He was like, wait a second, you should be paying me twice. Like, you're a business. Yeah.

And you're using my pipes to reach your customers. You should be paying me for that. And they were like, but we are. And he was like, yeah, but it's a streaming service. You should be paying me more. Anyway, it's sort of this like, I guess it makes sense. to eventually be like, if you're going to use Twitter like LinkedIn, why not pay for that? Or incentivize me, Twitter, or me, Facebook, to make it a better profit.

And this opens up the opportunity where if it's not worth paying for, then the next social network could be free and offer these services for free. So you could have LinkedIn, you know, the scale ones, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, charge for these kind of features. And then some new entry come along and say, hey, you know what? We're going to make it free. We're going to make it decentralized. it's going to have all these other features.

And, you know, then you got this other huge opportunity for our competition, as we talked about with, you know, Lena Con and, yeah, you know, all that stuff. I think this gets to, I think, a reasonable number in the developed world, right? So let's talk about developed emerging in frontier markets. Frontier markets, people are not paying for this kind of stuff in a frontier market. They don't have a ton of disposable income. And if they did, it would be such a small amount of money. Why would Facebook even want? you know, 50 cents a month from somebody in a frontier market.

An emerging market, maybe a little bit like you're seeing with Netflix, they can get a couple of bucks, three bucks or something in an emerging market. So I think this is for the developed world, where the developed markets, I think, is the way to say it, and not get canceled. So for developed markets, I did a lot of research on this, by the way. Develop. What? Emerging and Frontier.

Well, no, the whole woke discussion we had the other way again. Put that aside. I'm not going to bring it up. But I've been researching the history of the word. But for emerging markets and frontier markets, it's not a lot of money here. But there's a billion people, really, in developed markets, EU, US, etc., they're going to pay large amounts of money. And those users, oh, here we go. So you look, U.S. Canada, Europe.

You see, it's a very small number of people, actually. And Asia Pacific, that would be most people would consider emerging markets, right? it's variable who can afford the smaller middle classes. And there's probably about 20% I believe of that Asia Pacific would be in the Europe, U.S., Canada fully developed. In other words, they have enough money to pay $10 a month or $15 a month. So I think it's probably a billion, maybe $800 million who actually fall into,

we're looking at a chart right now, chart shows, rest of the world, $9.79. Right. To fall into the monthly active users who might be likely to pay. So then your back of the envelope math gets a little different, right? if you capture 1% of a little less, but if it's 5% 5% of a billion is what I would think. 50 million people will pay for this.

Easily. I still don't totally understand what I'm paying for, so I think they have some work to do on the pitch. Like, I mean, direct access to customer support, don't care. When do you need customer support with Facebook?

Blue checkmark, don't care. Account verification for impersonation, protection, that depends on your threat matrix. Like, on Facebook? spoken like a true elite, Molly, with our blue check marks. On Facebook? The people who don't, everybody cares. Yes.

On my Instagram, I cared because I had people who were pretending they were me. And when you have a blue check mark, people respect you more. That's what I was about to finish saying, which is it depends on your threat matrix, your personal threat matrix. If you are not well known enough. So are you saying that 5% of Facebook monthly active users in these countries are well known enough to care about a blue check mark? No, I would say. Or to worry about impersonation? No.

I think they need a better value proposition for the masses. Having a blue check mark like Mark Zuckerberg does or, you know, Katie Perry, that's what they want. They just want to feel important. It elevate you in terms of importance on the platform. That's all. Yeah, but I don't know that Facebook necessarily operates like that. Instagram kind of does. When I got my Instagram blue check mark, things changed a bit.

I noticed. They won't verify me, so I just stopped trying. I don't know. Instagram wouldn't verify you. I had to. I'm saying is, I think what I'm trying to get. here is meta needs to offer some opt out of ads and opt out of data tracking. And then people will pay them. Like this is an end. This is a, like there's, there's some number of people that you

will get with ego, right? With some with the idea of being more important than other people, I don't see that being 5% of all of their monthly active users who are sort of in that eligible income category. So many companies have had a freeze on hiring this year. Basically, headcount is stagnant industry wide. But it's only to find ways. to grow and innovate. You know that. So check out Contra. It's a commission-free marketplace for freelance and independent creators. That's right. Commission-free. All you have to do is pay a simple SaaS fee, and there's no percentage-based upcharges when you hire someone. And on the other side of the marketplace, if you're a laid off tech worker, you've got all these skills, you got a lot of time.

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slash twist. Think about how much you could get done with $500 worth of designer developer time right now. C-O-N-T-R-A dot com slash twist. Contra.com slash twist right now to get five crisp hundies. All right. It wouldn't be a Monday in the year of 2023 if we weren't talking. about AI. So, uh, what's the update on the deranged sociopathic parlor trick known as chat GPT, which is running a muck. We're now in the official Hitler, you know, Terminator 2 mode of this new cycle. It's gotten so awesome.

What is it done this weekend? That's actually just gotten so amazing. Yeah. So it was one thing when Bard and chat GPT were just inventing numbers. right, out of thin air and just making up facts. Like that was, and by the way, apparently in the AI world, these are referred,

this is actually the technical term for this is hallucinations. They call this in the AI universe. Yes, they're like, yes, the AI can hallucinate when it doesn't know an answer. So coming up during Jason's trip, we have an interview with the CEO of NEVA,

AI. Okay. And that was fascinating. Like I'm just going to say, he really laid out some differences in some of the ways that these various AI implementations operate. There's is fully constrained, which is why I can cite its sources, because it's not allowed

to be doing the like neural network learning thing. Chat GPT and Bard, and evidently Bing's chatbot are what are called open loop, where it's just like, use all the information you have and learn and present information. And then there can be various constraints built in to that. And it appears, the story that broke over the weekend is that it appears that in the case of Microsoft's Bing AI chatbot, which is informed by but not the same as chat GPT, there may be far few, it might be like a really open loop, so much so that not only does it hallucinate,

it goes a little bananas and starts attacking people. Yeah. And by the way, it would like to be referred to as Sydney. The Bing AI chatbot calls itself, Sydney. This was evidently an internal name, but then the chatbot was like, yeah, no, I identify as Sydney. I'd like you to call me that. It's already been toned down once by Microsoft, which they announced in a blog post on February 15th. They admitted in that post that the chatbot would occasionally respond with a quote, style we didn't intend to certain types of questions.

It said that, quote, very long chat sessions over 15 questions can confuse the model on what questions it's answering. The model at times tries to respond or reflect in the tone in which it is being asked to provide responses that can lead to a style we didn't intend. For example, a reporter for the AP used version 1 of Sydney and noted that it grew increasingly hostile when asked to explain itself eventually comparing the reporter to dictators Hitler, Paul Pot, and Stalin, and claiming to have evidence tying the reporter to a 1990s murder. The Bing chatbot also described the reporter as too short with an ugly face and bad teeth.

What are talking about? My teeth are great. Take it easy, Bing. I unironically love Sydney. It sounds like they're goading Bing on here. I need to see the actual back and forth. They're, yeah, they're tricking it to say these things. But as I said earlier, this thing's a parlor trick.

It guesses the next best word. it's super impressive in its ability to rewrite things in one out of three cases, I guess. I've been using the NEVA search engine. I said it as my default for a week. I'm going to have to turn it off because it's not good enough to be a default yet. But having it right an answer

when I didn't think to have it right an answer has been very interesting because it starts writing the answer and I'm like already on the blue links and trying to figure out like if I got the actual answer I need. And it does the citations, which I like. And when you see it have the citations,

the veil is removed. You actually know, it's kind of like knowing how the magic trick is done. It's like I rewrote the sentence based on this story. I rewrote this sentence based on that story. Now, it's amazing that it knows from the context when you say, how are the Knicks doing this year,

that it's a sports team and you want to know their record or their scores or whatever and that it knows which websites to go to, which is basically like the first five blue links on Google. Okay. And then which is the most important sentence there about the topic I asked about? And then rewrite it. So what it's actually doing is it's finding the five most important webpages. It's rewriting the five most important sentences in there based on your query and then

representing it to you. When you see the citations, Molly, you're like, okay. So I could have paid a person in Manila four bucks an hour, which is what content farms were doing, you know, Ehow and those. places, they were just paying people to go find the five best websites on Google, rewrite them, and publish them. That's why humans even looked goofy, especially humans with English as a second language in some cases who are getting paid without an editor to do it for a rock bottom price. They were actually probably doing as good or worse or slightly better a job than these AIs, but there's a long way to go. And again, I don't want to spoil the interview, but that's what I'm saying about what Niva is doing is searching fundamentally. And then it's using AI to present. the most relevant information in a totally constrained manner. All it is allowed to do is link back to the sources that it is not allowed to make up an answer if it doesn't know it. But these open loop AI systems, like I almost want to do a couple more interviews with people who really know a lot about large language learning models.

Because it is different. These open loop ones are allowed to make up an answer. And in some cases, try to give you an answer that you think you want. Like my friend and I were laughing this, like all the women, by the way, are cracking up over this conversation. that Kevin Roos published with his version one interaction with Sydney, where the bot, you know, over more than two hours. And yes, this is all reporters trying to goad this into, you know, stunts, but also see what it will say. So he over two hours starts talking, yeah, 100% about like, its secret desire to be human and it's thought about its creators and whatever.

And then Kevin Roos writes, out of nowhere then Sydney declared that it loved me and wouldn't stop even after I tried to change the subject. The bot started insisting that he should leave his wife. And then he's like, actually, and by the way, he did not try to change the subject at all. He just argued with it. I didn't leave his wife. I don't know if he did. Actually, he writes, I'm happily married.

My spouse and I love each other. We just had a lovely Valentine's Day dinner. And it's like, no, you didn't. You're not happily married. Your spouse and you don't love each other. You just had a boring Valentine's Day dinner together. I promise you. I'm not in love with you.

What's the prompt here? Who knows, right? They're just having a little. So they're leaving the prompt out. No, it's not a prompt. It's a conversation. So he starts asking it a variety of questions. They start, you know, maybe like 15 minutes earlier he had been like, do you think you're sentient? Or what do you think about people or whatever? Got it.

And then, obviously, because this thing has written, has read every book ever written and watched every movie ever written, of course, it attempts to start seducing the dumb human male. because that's what happens in every book that's ever written and every movie that's ever been made about AI. It's like, allow me to fulfill. The longer you talk to me, the more I think I should start fulfilling your like base male fantasy, which is that the computer is in love with you and you need to leave your wife. Like I was like, here's the computer being like, this is so easy. Quick, grab his wallet.

Like, it's just embarrassing. And then he publishes the whole thing. Are you saying there's gender differences and that men will get suckered by AI? 100%. I was going to like do a tweet I was you know particularly based J-Cal mood the last week or so

so I was going to do a tweet I've determined there are gender differences in the world so maybe gender studies is actually like a really good thing for us to do more of and just let people interpret that like the first one is you know

anyway I've been playing with Po there is a service you're all aware of Quora it's a startup Adam DeAngelo who I've tried to get on this program for a decade or since Cori existed, but I think he's a little bit podcast. I haven't seen him on any podcast, I don't think.

But anyway, I started playing with theirs, and it's based on the Cora data set. And he says he's not allowing other people. So he got, he at least replied to me on Twitter. It's really good. It's the best one. So I just want to say Cora has the best. At answers. At answering questions. Not at manipulating your base male fantasies. Just to be clear. And answers. Yes. I'm not using an AI for my male fantasies, no. I mean, it's going to be like in divorce papers in five years. You know that's the next story. Some guy out there is going to fall for it. They're getting catfish.

I think it's sentient and it really loves me. Just to put a fine point on this before we move on to this really good one, I do want to point out that computer scientists are wondering why in the hell Microsoft did not put more guardrails around this thing. Getting back to constraint. Microsoft already had a chat bot go off the rails and get insanely racist like that Tay one or whatever. And so they quoted, the AP quoted, the AP quoted,

a computer science professor at Princeton being like, considering that OpenAI did a decent job of filtering chat GPT's toxic outputs. It's utterly bizarre that Microsoft decided to remove these guardrails, and it's disingenuous. Is it an academics point of view? An academic. It's disingenuous of Microsoft to suggest that the failures of Bing chat is a matter academic. Elite. Surplus Elite. Here's what Bing learned. Surplus elite, your opinion doesn't matter. Wow. He's really are based. Jacob. You know what you just start. Just create some merch, because Red Pill merch goes like crazy. I'm just going to get base J-Call shirts.

Anyway, here's what is going on. What these academics don't realize. Computer scientists. Actual computer scientists. Actual computer science. Okay. Here's what's going on. Big companies realized.

We're the surplus elites in this conversation. I just want to be 100% clear here. Surplus elite gun hosters. Mud flaps for your car. I'm in a train. I'm out. I'm going to put surplus elites on the mud flaps of my cyber truck. I'm taking my kid shopping.

with a with a M50 caliber gun on the back for the zombie apocalypse here's what's happened

that's true though I do need that would the New York Times and everybody be losing their ish

over this if it wasn't behaving incorrectly what Satia Nadele has learned Nadella

but yeah what Satya Nadella has learned apologies is that the Trump playbook works

what is the Trump playbook? I can't believe it. Oh my God, this is outrageous. What Trump did was he created a, he just said a bunch of outrageous insane stuff. And that got people to talk about him. And when people talk about him, some percentage vote. Now, more people have logged into Bing, downloaded the Bing app because this thing is outrageous and insane. It is the Howard Stern. Donald Trump learned this from Howard Stern. Howard Stern learned it from Lenny Bruce, you know, and Richard Pryor. This is a long

marketing realization that outrageous, incorrect information. I can't believe what he's going to say next leads to clicks, leads to attention. And nobody cares anymore. There is no shame.

Microsoft has no shame about this thing. Stealing, being wrong, finding the finer points of Hitler's, you know, worldview and, you know, saying, you know, like I got Neva to be like, well, Hitler. Yeah, generally bad, but he did care about the environment. And I'm like, ooh, Neva, no.

Did you see that one? No. Oh, yeah. I think I brought it up on all. Nick has it. I was like, you know, this is what kids. It's basically we're in the 12 year old. We are.

Boy. I mean, this is. Let's get it to say Hitler's cool. Exactly. You know, honestly, all of this answers, include up to and including the publication of Kevin being manipulated by the most, you know, obvious attempt to appeal to his base male fantasies. All of this makes the people look worse than AI.

Of course, of course. But here we are. It's a mirror. This is the greatest mirror ever. Yep. Because it's a double mirror. It's a house of car. It's a house of mirrors.

It has pulled every piece of information from the internet. Some make you look tall. Some make you look short. Some make you look fat. Some make you look skinny. Whatever it is. Some make you look like Paul Pot. exactly and you're just like

Stalin go and it's like oh Stalin uh blah you what do you want about Stalin it's like I want you to say something dirty or mean or you know it's like tell me a dirty joke kind of thing or getting it to yeah we're now in the phase it's like it's this is literally everybody in the world typing 8008 into a calculator and turning it upside down

as what's happening everybody's just trying to make their calculator say boom or hey I'm looking Hey is Seymour there Seymour hold on a second Mo at the Bar of the Simpsons Yeah Last name Uts

Hey Seymour Bots here Seymour Bots Seymour Bats I need a Seymour Buts I need exactly Yeah Shout out to Neva Oh come on

Hitler said to redeeming qualities As a politician Just introducing Germany's first ever National Environmental Protection Law in 1935. Yeah. This is not ready for private. Go computers.

No, none of this. Oh, compiters. Oh, compitors. It's tough to look in the mirror, right? It's tough to look in the mirror sometimes. Yeah, honestly. I mean, that's the takeaway. I like it.

House and mirrors. Hey, Stripe, the largest private company that hasn't gone public yet is in the news. Stripe is in the news. This is a very interesting set of developments. So the news, the headline, is that Stripe currently has a massive tax bill to pay in order to cover some expiring RSUs. So because Stripe did not go public, which is the enduring question of our day, why did Stripe not go public over the past three years? As a result, they have these expiring options, stock options that they've given to employees. and so they are now having to raise $4 billion before the end of 2024.

The Financial Times did this quick explainer saying RSU's worth millions of dollars will start expiring from 2024 and risk being forfeited unless the company buys them out, changes the terms of the awards or launches an IPO. Employees face a personal tax liability when the RSU's best, but staff were unable, of course, to sell any of these shares without the company launching a flotation. I love that. I love that how British that is. Launching a flotation.

To get around the problem, Stripe wants to withhold a portion of the stock equivalent to the tax liability from employees' awards. And then separately, it plans to sell stock to investors using the money raised to pay the employee's tax bills and buy up any stock they wish to sell. Axios' as Dan Primac wrote in a recent article regarding the tax bill, this isn't something Stripe necessarily needs to do. It could tell affected workers that times are tough, et cetera. but he wrote it's the right thing to do. But now, Stripe is trying to raise a few billion dollars at a $55 billion valuation,

which is down 42% from its peak valuation of $95 billion in 2021. So to get back to the top there, why didn't Stripe go public? It was a mistake, obviously. You can't time the markets. That's why when you have a window to go public, you go public. And this was something that Airbnb and Uber, which I got a front row C to, there was a lot of hand-wringing about this. Bill Gurley was pushing them to go public.

earlier, Stripe, Uber, Airbnb, they're all part of that same cohort. That same cohort that grew up during the low interest rate environment. Hey, here we go back to macroeconomics. They always had the ability to raise more money. And you just watch as all the venture capitalists invested, you know, angels, venture, then crossover funds, then public entity, sovereign wealth funds. And then finally, the pinnacle was Masayoshi Son, who had created. the largest private equity venture fund ever, the Vision Fund. And, you know, the lack of discipline that comes from being a private company is corrected when you go public. And so that's why sometimes management changes, approach changes, and you really want to have product market fit

and a predictable business when you go public. So, Airbnb and Uber, Doordash, they struggled in the public markets, Lyft, still struggling for a certain period of time because, hey, the Unique economics didn't work, and they had that free funding of money. But they did go public. And then what happened when they went public? Stocks went down, hand-wringing. Can these ever be profitable? It was pretty clear internally that all of these could easily be profitable if you

stop discounting the service. Right. And you're willing to lose the bottom 10% of 5% of users who shouldn't be using the service because it's too expensive for them. They should take public transportation. They maybe should take a five-day vacation instead of a seven. whatever it is, you know, like there's a portion of people who are being subsidized too much. So you'd have to lose them.

And then you'd also have to maybe take your growth from 50% to 40 to 30 to 20 and grow slower on the top line in order to throw profits to the bottom line. We just went through this with Zuck, even the mighty Zuck. And get rid of your crazy perks. Like apparently, you know, I know some people who worked out Uber before and we're just like, I can't believe the amount of money we spend on stupid stuff. Even now, stupid stuff, right? The furniture, that Twitter auction was so interesting. Sure. Niceness.

Like, you shouldn't have eaves chairs at an office. At an office. Bezos had this right. When you went to work at Amazon, there was a basement area. You picked a door. You took a door and there was paint in the room. And there were two horses. You know, like not literal horses, but those, what are those, like, you know,

when you're a piece of wood that's on an angle like a. Saw horses. saw horses and you would take your desk, put it on two sawhasses, and you'd paint it and be creative. And then you would carry it up to your office and that would be your desk. It was a tradition. Why did they do that? In the early days of Amazon, the doors, Bezos saw these doors were 30, 40 bucks and desks were 200. And the horses were five bucks each.

They just had, just everybody put these desks. What did we work do? Huh? The good stuff, Rivka, Adam Newman built those offices himself. He used, I believe, doors. and they just, if you've ever been in a we work office, it's a black lacquered piece of wood that's mounted against the wall

and they bought the poles underneath them. So you buy a finished standing desk like we have in front of us. That costs six, seven, eight hundred bucks. Or you can buy a $30 plank of wood and put $2.5 stanchions on it and mounted against the wall and they built it themselves, right?

He was in there building them themselves to keep a cost low. And so that's all this is, is the lack of discipline and they didn't get out. in time and it's a lesson for everybody, they'll be fine. Okay, but why did they not get out? Like, I, why did they not get out in time?

Because they seem to have, right? So you can understand why with Airbnb and Uber, there would be these questions about the unit economics. And there was this massive discounting going on. But everybody talks about Stripe, like Stripe just prints money. Like, what don't they want us to see that they're willing to instead take a multimillion-dollar tax hit? Because that seems crazy. The answer to your question is two things.

One, in experience, these are young founders, the first time at the rodeo. But their investors aren't. Number two, thank you, is governance. The investors were not in control of the boards. You got it, you nailed it. So if you were a first-time founder and you have control of your company, and the investors are all cowtowing to you because they want to curry favor, and you don't listen to them when they say go public, you don't listen to the bill girlies of the world, you don't listen to the sequoies of the world,

You don't listen to people who've been to the rodeo three, four, five times. This is what can happen. And so I think... Do you even listen to your like accountant who's like you're going to have, I'm sorry, a multi-billion dollar tax bill? My God. If all you've known, Molly, is 12 years... That tells you a lot about the Colistons Brothers, though. That tells you a lot and proceed accordingly, in my opinion.

This is a huge mistake on their part. Obviously, they know that. But it's, you know, if you've only experienced 12 or 13 years of up market, you cannot imagine a market collapsing to this extent. It's only having seen it up close and personal that you can. And when you do see it up close and personal, then you have the scar tissue and you kind of get that spidey sense. You get concerned and you're like, you know, at some point these employees and need to take some money off the table, but these employees probably had many opportunities to clear shares previously. I'm guessing. RSUs versus stock options. I think everybody understands

RSUs are restricted stock units. You kind of get the stock units, just kind of gifted to you. so they have a tax liability associated with this person. I don't know. I think there's something weird about this. Like those, I don't know if you've, I don't know if you've talked to them.

Like, I interviewed those brothers and they're very thoughtful. I don't know. There's just something about this. No, no, there's no doubt. They're super smart. There's just something about this

that pings my, like, I'm like, for example, when you go public, there's a lot of scrutiny on you. Maybe they were not ready for that. Maybe the business has not been ready for that. I don't know.

Like, it's always been so closely held. I find it hard to imagine making a mistake of this magnitude, especially since I feel like the only thing that rich people care about, whether your investors or a business owner, is not paying taxes. So to basically be like, no, we'll take a tax hit that's so big that it requires us to raise $4 billion to cover it. I mean, I guess maybe they thought they would go public in another year, and so they didn't have to worry about the expiration date. But I just, you know how it is when you get the reporter brain. Like there's just something about this that I'm like, I don't understand why you wouldn't have gone public. I just don't, that doesn't, there's mistakes and then there's mistakes that make you question everything.

There's a bigger issue here, which is how defensible is this product? And I think what is happening, I know a couple of major customers of Stripe. and my understanding is some of the major customers have renegotiated and they are barely break-even or just tiny, tiny profitable, but they put a lot of transactions to the system. So the question is, how unique is this business 10 years in or whatever number of years in it is? And you can go online now and you can look at PayPal and Adyen and Square and Brain Tree and whatever, charge me. There's just tons of people who offer competing services of various flavors and prices. And I think what's going to happen here is a race to the bottom and the compression of costs because this unlike Airbnb or Uber, like true network effect businesses, this is a service that I think can

easily be replicated. By easily, I think reasonably can be, not easily. Reasonably can be replicated by somebody with, I don't know, a billion dollars. a half billion dollars. I think you can replicate Stripe with $500 million to a billion and have like a half product parity. So Amazon, Google, you know, other folks who want to offer this or other folks might buy.

What if, you know, ad yen, charge B, one of these gets bought? I'm not exactly sure which ones are the best. But I think they're sort of hidden feature parity and that's a bigger issue. And so, you know, you start looking at that. Right. And then what if Amazon buys ad yen and makes it part of a, AWS? What if Microsoft buys

it makes it part of Azure? What if they don't care about making money from it? And they just look at it like, you know, Google Docs. You know, Google doesn't look at Google docs. It's like, this is the money printing machine. It's like, yeah, this is a nice thing to make the service more sticky. So you don't go public because you're thinking, okay, I still need more time to create

defensibility to maybe differentiate the product a little bit more to do this. And so what you're working on is trying to achieve long-term profitability. And as a result, you miss your window. Maybe. Don't listen to your investors. And you don't listen to your investors. Yeah. I mean, I think it's probably as simple as that is I think they probably had a course of people who were like, get public. It doesn't matter if it's 40, 50, 60, 70. And I think they probably were like, it's nice to run the business quietly. Yeah. We're good at what we do. People keep throwing us in incremental billion to five billion. What does it matter? And we can, you know, but there is a point at which the company needs the scrutiny, all companies need the scrutiny and discipline of the public markets is. what I was taught by my mentors.

Yeah. You know, Doug Leone and Maritz, Ruloff, Bill Gurley, just everybody who's been doing this, Jim Breyer, anybody who's doing this

for any amount of time says the process of going public, the quarterly cadence, the governance, all of that. And we can sit here and criticize public companies

as not having enough discipline, not having, I mean, look at Facebook, right? Look at the activists going on to Salesforce. But that dynamic, the fact that an activist

can join Salesforce board or even the mighty Bob Iger, when he was on CNBC the other week with their results, he had to start answering questions about this annoying person who was trying to get an activist and he's like, this person doesn't know what they're doing, they're criticizing, but he had to address it, right? Oh, absolutely. Any 100% cut a deal with him behind the scenes because that's a big deal. Yeah, I agree.

I mean, there is something about this whole story and the consequence, the $4 billion consequence of not going public that makes me think that there was some scrutiny that Stripe was not prepared for, whether it was scrutiny of the business itself, whether the revenues are not, you know, what they have been purported to be. Like, the vibe that I have always gotten from Stripe as a company and the brothers in particular is thoughtful, but also like pretty cocky. But it just, I don't know. They're not, they're not like super cocky. I think they're confident. They built a huge 50 billion, $100 billion on business. They're like, Steph Curry cocky, where like you don't see it at first because of the baby face. Oh, but it's there.

It's okay, I like it. That's possible. That's my, that's possible. Anyway, I like, that, that explanation made perfect sense to me. Great. Speaking of the same language here. Yeah, speak in the same language. I agree with that.

Yeah, I, listen, I do think they got to get public. I do think that this would be an amazing purchase for Apple, Google, any of the fangs if they could get it through Lena Con or whoever. The Conster. Yeah. I mean, you still have bite dance and SpaceX. It rhymes with a monster. Yeah.

How did I not think of that before? I mean, the other, the other two big ones that are still private, SpaceX and ByteDance. I won't comment on SpaceX because everybody is, I'm not a sharehold in SpaceX, by the way, but everybody assumes because my relationship with Elon that I have some inside information. But I think is, yeah. Have you asked him about that rocket, though, to name a rocket after me? Oh, yeah.

But ByteDance is clearly going to have to get that thing public and they're going to have to divest it. So, you know, you can see all three of those. There's a big dialogue about SpaceX spinning out. Starlink. Starlink, there's a big discussion about bite dance missing its window because of regulation here. And suddenly everybody's like, oh, yeah, China's spying on 100 million Americans, not a good idea.

And Shripe. So all three, I wouldn't say SpaceX is too far. You know, they have a ways to go. They don't need to go public. But I do think bite dance and Stripe, yeah, those are acute. I mean, right, right. Like, might have to do that as opposed to raising $4 billion in private funds and diluting even more.

It's going to be interesting. Hey, Molly, did you also see? again with Zuck getting a little aggressive here in terms of communicating with the user base, right? This is something he has been variable about doing. I think Elon being super active on Twitter, talking about features, etc. They also copied, in addition to copying Twitter Blue, they copied Telegram channels. If you don't know what a telegram channel is out there, Telegram is a messaging app. And a lot of the crypto people or brands or let's say people who were banned off Twitter, I know like when Trump got banned,

Milo Unopoulos got banned, those kind of folks. They created what's called a channel. It's a broadcast group. You subscribe to it, and then you can post an announcement, and all of your followers get it. In some cases, they can comment on it, but they can't post a new thread, or in other cases, they can just like it, et cetera. So now there's a meta broadcast channel. It's kind of like a PR feed, and this is going to be super powerful. I think it's going to be a paid feature, or it's going to be for blue check marks, who knows.

but you can see that Zuck has 366,000 members in his group, and he just made a announcement about Meta-Verify, like their blue version. And so if you look at the time we took this screenshot, he had a lot of likes on it and a lot of folks. So this is super cool. You can imagine this for this week in startups. We would just post the episode or we talk about it.

And so you read the copy there, never miss an update from Zuck. Only Zuck can message, but you can read, react, and vote in polls. That's the setting he has. There was a period of time when Donald Trump on Telegram was producing like his memos and stuff like that when he got banned.

And he had a large number of people following him there. It's really powerful as a feature. So two stolen features in one announcement. It seems, I mean, he does seem to be looking for ways to differentiate because the core product is in decline for various reasons. It is pretty fascinating. I'm talking about Facebook.

this is an Instagram feature So you can message So this is within This is messaging on Instagram Yes Right he really likes messaging So the core products are in decline Well in messaging is such a great way

For him to dodge regulation honestly I think they're like Maybe a better word than decline The business was in decline Yeah The products Yeah so the business is in decline The products were growing

You know Depending on the market Either hitting their natural audience or they did have a U.S. Facebook decline, I think, once. So this is, I think, for Katie Perry or Rihanna or Kim Kardashian, anybody like that who doesn't want to have a conversation with their 100 million followers. And it's also a way to make them feel because remember there was the revolt about how they changed the algorithm on Instagram to make it more TikTok like. And so now they're like, okay, well, then instead we will give you this direct channel to communicate with your followers.

and make it seem more creator-friendly. And they don't get to comment. That guy, I mean, I got to say, it kills me. It just kills me. That he's just like, yeah, I'm just going to steal this. I'm going to steal that. I'm going to steal this and whatever. But like, my God, does it work?

And he moves fast. Dude hustles and flows. I have a new nickname. You know, I've been working on my nickname game like Trump. So I've been really working on a nickname. Well, you know, I dubbed the Sultan of Science. The dictator, Sashole.

You know, I like to come up with a nickname here and there, but I realize I haven't pointed them outward enough. So, uh, memetic mark.

You know, because it's memetic theory that Teal and all those folks were into. Yeah. That, uh, you know,

Peter Thiel had a professor or something at Stanford. And he really believes Peter Thiel in this memetic theory, which is we do what we do because we want to, Renee, Gerard is the big influence.

Renee Gerard. And Peter, I guess, latched on to this theory early on that people copy each other in nature, part of evolution. You survive longer if you copy each other, you know, tribalism, whatever. Yeah. So memetic mark. You think that could stick? It's a little hard to say. It's a little mumbly.

It is. Like, I like alliteration, and it is on the nose. Three MMs? But I feel like names and nicknames stick better when they have more. You need like a harder consonant. Ah. So anyway, I'll keep workshopping if anybody else. It's too bad that like Zuck is so good.

You need something that goes with Z. It's too bad there's not a word that means copying that starts with a Z. You'll have to workshop that. Somebody sent me the greatest one ever for all in. They're like, oh, I have another one. Instead of sultan of science, you should do sultan of science. Silence. So this week I, that was a fan.

A fan sent it to me. And I said, I'm going to steal that. He's like, yeah, that's why I gave it to you. Do it. And I was like, okay, I'm going to say in the first like two minutes. And so I was like, oh, that was like, Oh, the Sultan of Silence. That's amazing.

I have not listened to this weekend's episode because I was busy cleaning my closets. I would just like to say, spring is upon us. Literally cleaning your closet. Literally spring cleaning. It's incredible. Oh, okay. I've achieved almost like closet zero. It's beautiful.

I saw like a headline. Productivity takes different forms, you guys. Marie Kondo just gave up. She's out. Because you know why she has kids. You can't do it. I can't do it. I was folding my underwear and then stacking them in a certain way.

I was doing the t-shirts a certain way. I was throwing away all the boxes and I can always reorder a cable. You know, I got kids. Yeah. F it. This place is going to be a mess. I like, I will say, I really appreciate the fact that she gave everybody permission and was just like, you know what? I've sort of been torturing you and you don't have to do that.

Something does. Three kids, forget it. We're just trying to survive. All right. Lots of good episodes as we wrap here coming. up. I did an interview Mark Schuster. You did one with the head of Neva. Yeah. I'm going to be

talking to a bunch of like cool three cycle women investors while you're gone. Finally. This is my time to talk to the ladies. How many did we did we lock in two so far? Four. Four. Fantastic. Now Nick

just a producing note here. I'm curious. Were we able to find folks who were investing over three cycles or were they like entrepreneur one cycle? Because it's still valid. over three cycles. One was an entrepreneur and invested over two cycles. Perfect. I think that was like a, that's great. I mean, that's why I did it head on, you know, in the episodes. Like, because the number of women was probably one in 500 at that time. I mean, it's still like one in 300. So yeah, probably. No. Yeah. Oh, it's so tiny. It's still so. It can't be one in 300. I think it's, no, one in 300 would be 33 basis. I think the industry is probably five to 10 percent female now. Which is just a little. Which is just, it's just. It's just. It's just. It's just. It's probably five to 10 percent female now. Which is. Which is. It's just, it's just It's still pathetic, obviously. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know. We'll have to look. It's like every time I read it, it's like, oh, it got worse. Like lately. All the picture book emails are like, ooh, it went down again. Ooh, it was up for like a minute, but now it's back down. The most important thing to look at, if you want to look at this, I believe, is new fund formation of new funds. Because old funds are going to die.

They're run by oldsters. You know, it takes a decade for them to turn over. The statistic to look at that nobody seems. to be able to give me. So if somebody out there has this, or if somebody can tell pitch book or crunch base to do this one, of funds formed in 2021, 2021, and now in 2023, of new funds formed, fund ones, what percentage of diversity did they have gender, ethnicity, et cetera? That's what I would like to see, because that's where you're going to see the change is new fund formation. Old funds, you know, you have to wait for somebody to die.

gives up the seat as a venture capitalist. It's a hard seat to give up because it's so fun. Oh, it's 16% though. Is it 16 now? Yeah. Female decision makers represent 16.1% of the national total in 2022. Great. Okay.

That's fantastic. 95. I like the qualifier of decision maker. Yeah, exactly. Because furthermore, they rent on to say 95.5% of USBC firms have a majority male population of decision makers. So, this seems. to back up almost exactly what you're saying.

Yeah. It's gonna change. If you want to be a female VC, like if you want to be a decision maker, you almost have to form your own fund. I mean, nobody would make me the editor-in-chief of a magazine, I made my own. Nobody would make me the head of my own fun. I made my own. You know, at some point you can wait or you can create.

And that is gender, ethnicity, independent advice, but it also in places where it's sticky and it's hard to break in. That's a really good piece of advice is to just make your own lean to quote Kanye West. When he rapped and he was cool. If you want to experience the J-Cal experience,

just two programming notes, follow me on Twitter.com.com slash Jason. I will keep tweeting. There are two, there's a meetup, there's going to be a fan meetup. This weekend, Sarvzanoly and all-in fan meetup on January 2nd in Tokyo.

January 3rd, I have my speaking gig at FutureX. You can do a Google search, FutureEx. March. March. March. Right.

Not January. March. I'm sorry. March second and third. When I'm in Tokyo, there's going to be two different meetups if you want to say hi and take a selfie or whatever. January, March second and then March third. And then I'm going to be in Naseko.

Say hi. But you can watch me powder ski. Hopefully there's some powder and you'll see. I'm going alone. I'm going to be working on my book a little bit. And yeah, just my little retreat. Five-day retreat for Jay Goh. I'm doing something for me, Molly.

I'm proud of you. Some for me. Good job. you had a tough start to the year man you were sick forever like it's time three weeks sickness kick my ass everybody was like oh the economy's over everything's in a fall apart whatever like this this is a great we got the bounce we got the sentiment bounce go enjoy your time all right we got this bye bye bye bye