This Week in Startups - MSFT adds $10B, Stripe mafia memes, Spotify: platform or publisher, Scratchpad case-study | E1370

Episode Date: January 27, 2022

We break down Microsoft’s amazing earnings (quarterly revenue is up $10B year-over-year) and assess if Satya Nadella is the greatest big tech CEO right now (2:32). Then, we follow-up on the Stripe Mafia thread yesterday from the Bolt CEO (20:59) and we talk about Neil Young asking to have his music removed from Spotify over Joe Rogan’s COVID conversations, which prompted a discussion of Spotify’s new headache is it a publisher or a platform (37:40)? And, we talk about Scratchpad raising $33M, which led to Jason's request for new types of startups: beautiful interfaces for giant clunky products. 00:00 Jason and Molly intro the show 02:32 Microsoft’s amazing earnings 09:29 Ourcrowd - Check out the deal of the week at https://ourcrowd.com/twist 10:04 Is Satya Nadella the greatest big tech CEO 19:01 Notion - Go to https://Notion.so and use promo code TWIST to get $250 off its annual team plan 20:59 Bolt vs. Stripe VC Twitter beef continued 30:07 Vanta - Get get $1,000 off automating your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist 31:27 The best jokes from Bolt & Stripe 37:40 Neil Young petitioned Spotify to remove his music over Joe Rogan’s COVID conversations 43:16 Is Spotify a publisher or a platform? 1:04:39 Scratchpad, a slick Salesforce front-end raises $33M 1:06:23 Request for new types of startups: beautiful interfaces for giant crappy products FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. We've got an amazing show for you today. Molly Wood is with me. Again, my co-host, you can follow her on Twitter at Molly Wood. She's gained like 20,000 followers since she started here, which is awesome. I know. Thanks, boss.

Yeah, that's pretty good. Just call me partner. Don't call me boss. You've been doing this as long as I have. I know he's like, I don't like it. I don't like it. Yeah. So anyway, we're going to talk about Microsoft absolutely crushing their earnings.

They're printing money. Satya is doing an amazing job. He's like the low profile, just absolute assassin in tech right now, absolutely brushing it. And then? And then we follow up on the Stripe Mafia thread yesterday from the Bolt CEO. There was a bit of a pile on by the VCs. Jason, of course, jumped into that pile because the man cannot resist. And we, I'm not going to lie, we indulge in just like reading a couple of fun tweets because it was low stakes.

It was meme-tastic. High amusement factor. I'm Ben, Molly and I get in a little bit of a debate. We have different opinions about Joe Rogan's podcast on Spotify, but we may have found some consensus of how to deal with COVID conversations. Neil Young asked to have his music remove from Spotify because he's so offended by Joe Rogan's anti-vax slash misinformation accusations, I guess. And then we go deep into podcasting, right?

We go deep into podcasting, our history with podcasts. And then, of course, a startup of the week and a request for an all-news startup. Who among you can fix Amazon? An RFS. Request for Startup. Stick with us. It's going to be an amazing episode. This weekend startups is brought to you by Our Crowd.

Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR. CROWD.com slash twist. Notion is one place for notes, docs, projects and everyday work that goes way beyond a wiki. Go to notion.s.O and use promo code Twist to get $250 off an annual team plan. And 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. All right, Molly, what's in the news today? Lots of news. In the news today, we're actually going to start with some earnings. It's going to be earnings week, and I suspect there will be some interesting stories, but we just could not walk on by the fact that Microsoft may have, in the words of Jim Kramer, had its best quarter ever. In its history.

In its entire history. Do you have supply chain woes other companies? Microsoft does not. Do you have customer issues or problems with hiring other companies? Microsoft does not at all. Microsoft is on pay. Revenue was up 20% year over year this quarter to 51. 20% on a very big number.

Zero. Like who thought Microsoft was a hypergrowth company? Just saying. On pace for almost $200 billion of revenue in fiscal year 2020, which would also be a 20% increase over 2021. They broke, they matched earnings. I think that the big takeaway for me was that they matched earnings on gaming. And that was almost $5.5 billion in revenue, which sort of like helps to explain why they're

continuing to invest there. But again, when you look at where all of this money is, first of all, it's still in Windows, right? It's still in the boring stuff. Productivity and business up 19%. $15.9 billion. That includes LinkedIn. LinkedIn.

LinkedIn up 37% year over year. Yeah, it makes total sense. I mean, if you just think about LinkedIn as solving problems for business people, like hiring and marketing, like just those two things, finding leads and finding employees, like that's like the core thing that businesses do every day. We need talent and we need those leads, like the Glenn Gary leads. We need the good ones. So that combined productivity and business.

process is that includes Windows. That includes Windows. That includes the Microsoft, the 365 solutions that you either pay for as a subscriber or consumer or they bundle it in now in Enterprise. I mean, they're doing a lot of quite clever bundling like they did in the old days to get people to buy everything at once. So it's enterprise licenses and it's consumer. The cloud business, of course, continues to be bonkers as your revenue alone up 46%

year-over-year, intelligent cloud revenue up 26% to $18 billion. And then personal computing up 15%, Xbox up 10% year-over-year, search and news advertising. Search. And I mean, they're even crushing it with Bing, Bing. It's a sleeper, you know, like they maintain that, I think they're somewhere in the 10 to 15% market share. So it's small, but, you know, they have an advertising business there and it works. and default browsers work and being the default search engine

and having news, it works. And I think they're licensing Bing to things like Apple, maybe to smart speakers. I don't know that this is... I think Duck, Duck, Do might use Bing and then wrap it. I think that might be how they build

their search engine, yeah. There used to be Yahoo had their own search API. Google had one. Google kind of shut it down because they didn't like the idea of people competing with them, go figure. And then Yahoo had search

monkey and they just never double down on it, but there would be like 30 search engines right now if Yahoo had kept that business going. It was a really cool idea. And I think Bing picked up that mantle. But when we look at this, there's three business lines. I don't know how they separate them, but productivity and business process, about $16 billion, the cloud, just over $18 billion. And then personal computing, which is super confusing because I guess it doesn't include personal uses of office software, but it does include search news, Xbox, and that's over 17 billion,

rounded up to 18. So all three business lines are almost exactly the same amount of money. Interesting. That's pretty interesting, too. That is fascinating. And then they don't reveal exact revenue, for example, LinkedIn, Azure,

which is interesting. Smart. They don't want to tip their cards. Right. They don't need Google and Amazon finding out exactly how much money they're really making on Azure. I would assume, if I had to guess, I would say personal computing means like Dell buying Windows licenses to put on their hardware.

As opposed to an enterprise computer and Dell sells a thousand workstations. I got it. Like every gaming laptop that has Windows pre-installed. I will say the Windows product is pretty phenomenal now. It's like really works well. It's tight. And gaming, who knew, but, you know, we thought gaming would maybe go to iPads and Android. And it turns out like hardcore gaming is just cementing it.

itself into PCs and now all these kids and you have a kid and I have kids. They all want a PC because they want to do Minecraft, Roblox. Microsoft Jones. Yeah. They want to do Fortnite. I mean, my daughters are like, I need a Microsoft account. I'm like, no, you don't. Like, no, I seriously need a Microsoft 365.

I'm like, no, you're too young for office. I'm like, no, I need it for Minecraft. Right. So now I've got to make my three daughters, you know, accounts on this service. I mean, interesting. When you think about the fact that there's this sort of behind the scenes trend, like, yeah, you're right, PC gaming is totally back. That's so interesting. It's driven by Minecraft, which Microsoft bought and just quietly returned all of the kids to and then let people build like player versus player. Like there's PVP servers and Minecraft now so that kids who aged out of Minecraft can now still play Minecraft because they fight. They get to kill each other. Yay. I mean, I just don't, I have yet to identify a misstep by Satanadella at all. Even the hardware, even the hardware. the surface hardware. It's pretty

fucking cool. Sorry. Yeah. Everything is pretty good. The surface hardware is delightful. I spoke at an event that gave me a surface.

I was like a thank you. That was very nice of them. That's a good gift because those things are nice. Yeah, it was like two grand. I have too many computers. I really got into Chrome

operating system for a while, but then when the pandemic happened and everybody started using Zoom, Zoom sucked on Chrome and in a browser. So my whole team, like abandoned Chrome. But in our offices,

we had Chrome is on the back of Dell 38 monitors, and it is so great and so stable. That seems to be also getting an incredible foothold in education. So I don't know if your kids have, like, Chrome laptops at school, et cetera. Oh, yeah, Chrome books galore.

So weird how Microsoft and Chrome have won the hearts and minds of this generation, and Apple hasn't. Yeah, Apple just went, Apple went premium. Like, full stop, right? They abandoned the, like, education market to some extent. I mean, they still have a little education discount, but what are you going to do with 15% when the starting price of everything is $6,700? They just decided we're a premium brand,

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slash twist. Once again, that's O-U-R-C-R-O-W-D.com slash T-W-I-S-T. But I think like as a sort of CEO to emulate, like when you look at CEOs that are just crushing it, I, Satya, what is so interesting about Satya Nadella is that he is crushing it so, he's so quiet, right? He's not in the mold of the CEO that is in the news. I actually wrote a piece for the Atlantic about how Microsoft, I did. By the way, that was a total humble brag.

That was a not humble brag. It's pretty good. Atlantic Sunday, that's a pretty great bylaw. They hired me for one piece so far. Pay well? Pay well or no. Oh, God, no, no. It's a magazine.

Come on. You're there for the news. Magazines used to pay one to three dollars a word. I used to get paid one, two. Remember those days? Yeah. 800 words, 800 bucks, 1,600 bucks. Those days are over.

Is it about that dollar a word? It's like 50, 75 cents a word, I think. I mean, I just can't get out of bed for that. I wrote about how they, I wouldn't do it for any other brand. Let me tell you that. But what I wrote about is that they have managed to evade the antitrust scrutiny and even the ire of Google and Facebook and even Apple to some extent because they're boring.

And they're just perfectly boring. Hey, there it is. Oh, thank you guys. Oh, I like the box. Maybe I'll do an Atlantic story. Just get to buy in an Atlantic piece. You know what? It feels really good.

Listen, I don't want to talk out of school here, but let's just say like the editorial page of the New York Times likes my opinions from time to time. So I did like the Q&A with Carerswisher and, you know, they kind of were like, maybe Jay Cowell should be on the editorial page. I mean, listen, they're the Amazon of media right now. They will eventually acquire us all. So like, just lean in. Not this spot.

Resistance is futile. Well, I think the. other thing here is, do they have a market dominant position in any of these? They don't versus AWS, Amazon's cloud. They don't versus video games writ large. We talked about that. We pulled up all the top video games. But like neither does Apple with phones and they still keep getting, right? It's like they've got the store. And then it's so under this under this sort of new scrutiny of antitrust, which includes acquisitions of which Microsoft has made many that potentially reduce competition, when it includes games.

of which Microsoft is certainly still guilty, right? They're still pushing bundles. Oh, without a doubt. They're still pushing bundles big time on enterprise customers. You're not forced to. So it's not like when you load Windows, you can't use a Chrome browser, and it's not like you can't use Google Docs.

And they don't have the majority of the operating system. So it's almost like they have a plan to not dominate in any one category, but to be the number one, two, or three, player in all categories. Right. It's a really interesting strategy. It's like duopoly, right?

Or maybe three. True. Maybe top three. And it's smart. Thropoli. Thropoli is pretty good, right? I know what do we call that? There are throttles.

I just came up with it. There might as well be thropolis. So yeah, a three part monopoly. I think that actually makes sense. Mm-hmm. I mean, it is, it is the total like quiet dominance strategy. And if it is, in fact, a strategy, it's working gangbusters as this quarter shows.

Well, and the product has gotten better. They would know for making janky products like, you know, like we'd take them four or five versions to make something refined. They did something well with UX, user experience where things have gotten easier and better to use, like the Xbox or Outlook or 365. I was on a meeting with some Seattle company and they were using their version of Zoom or Hangouts. I forgot the name of it. Teams, maybe. I've got the name of their video. Have you been on their video product? Are you talking about the Microsoft? Product?

Yeah, teams. Yeah, no, teams. It's kind of like funky fresh. Like, everybody's got a different size panel and you're moving around and it's like that little panel vibe they have in their U.X. I was okay with it. It worked reasonably well. It's like fine.

The Microsoft, the Amazon one is reportedly terrible. I've only been on it once and it was not great. Chime. Wait, there's an Amazon one? Oh, yeah. Amazon does not let you use tools from other people. So they have their own version of like Google Docs, internal. Internal.

But when you have a meeting with Amazon. Amazon people, you have to use chime. Because they don't want competitors knowing who's on their calls. Yeah. No competitors in the room. I mean, it's so Bezos, right? Smart move. Like, not even in the room. The other thing before we move on that I want to say

that I think is so interesting about Microsoft, or maybe you don't want to move on, but, you know, just in case. Um, is that what this also does is just put the nail in the coffin of all of the pundits, probably myself included, who said that once Microsoft failed at mobile,

They were like done as a company. They should circle back around on mobile. Should they? Why bother? I guess that if you look at the surface, it's very popular, right? Okay. And they could never get an app store going. But didn't they make a surface phone at some point?

I wonder if like a hard, or they made an Xbox phone. I know they were talking about that. I just wonder if they had an, if they came back around and had phones if they would do well or not. It's interesting. Because they have $75 billion in profit this year. I mean, or will hit something like that. I mean, what do you do with all that money?

I guess you buy. One of the Nodies says they are trying with an Android version. See, that's the dilemma is that you pretty much have to use Android. Like you can't, there's such a doopoly now in operating systems. You're not going to, you cannot be a new mobile OS. So they're saying they're trying with Windows is trying with Android, which we'll see. Stock by the way up about 5% as of 1,000. 30 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday market cap, $2.27 trillion.

Amazing. And then Apple's at 2.7 or something, or are they at $3 trillion? So, I mean, right behind them. Yeah. It's pretty impressive, I have to say. It would be great to have Sotta on the program to talk about startups. We should have them on. We should have them on.

Come on the pod. He's so nice. I think it would be a great conversation. Yeah. I saw an interview with him where he was talking about one of his kids, is got special needs, and it was quite impactful. I will tell you having talked to Satya, once for sure, maybe. He's not like, twice, I think.

Not the most dynamic interview. You didn't hear that for me because we definitely want him on the show. We would love to have the show. What you're saying is he kind of just, he's plain spoken. He's doing, he's not even that plain spoken. No, he's pretty like businessy. Like he's just a very CEO interview. And I think it sort of fits with this like, again, whether it's strategy or personality.

He's not a bragger. He's not that brash. He doesn't like make headlines when you talk to him. He's like he's a careful, deliberate, almost like purposefully boring. There are people who are. Yeah. There are operators like that. I mean, Cheryl Sandberg is the same way, right?

She's just a consummate operator. And they just talk about operating the business. as best they can. Totally. All right. Well, congratulations to the Microsoft people. You're making great products

and you're printing money. So congrats. And also really good at acquisitions. I have to say the LinkedIn acquisition was smart. Yeah. Well, and people make fun of them right there. Like you're buying Minecraft,

duh, dumb. You're buying LinkedIn, boring. And Satya is just like, heads down. Let me roll right over you while you talk about how boring I am.

I think that we could do a draft. They also got GitHub, right? Yeah. Here's a, here's an interesting draft. We take the top like five companies and what they bought. We put them all into a bucket.

And then we draft like three of us, you to meet you and like some other guests. We draft which of those acquisitions we would want to have to start a new company. So it's almost like if we added, you know, three expansion teams to the NBA. And then those teams got to draft

players from the other teams, right? So you'd be like, I'll take Janus. I'll build my team around staff. If I'm going for the future, I'm going to get this person, right? It's kind of like a fun thing to do. Who would you build your team around? Right.

You know, I think I'm going YouTube maybe. You know, I like the YouTube as an anchor. It's just an absolutely crushing. Yeah. Okay, I like this. I might. I don't want to tip my cards. At acquisition draft would be kind of interesting.

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So you ate your vegetables, everybody. We got you through earnings. And we're going to go through all the earnings. And so here we go. Yesterday, there was a bunch of back and forth. where the CEO Ryan Breslau who was on this pod

who had the four day work week at his company he's the CEO of Bolt he was saying how Stripe is a mafia Y Combinator plus Sequoia plus

all Adrescent Horowitz we covered on yesterday's show you can go back and listen to it but essentially the long and short of it was Y Combinator the VC community hacker news or in some grand conspiracy to block his company bolt from getting funding and getting into YC

and trending on Y Combinator. As I said yesterday, Y Combinator's hacker news is that the domain name, news.com. It is the alumni of Hacker News talking about technology. It is not an independent news source. Of course, they're going to vote for their home team, whether it's Airbnb, GitHub, or Stripe. So there's no conspiracy there. And there is a bit of a conspiracy. Well, it's not a secret conspiracy, right? It's just like, it's just how business works. It's just, it's how a community works.

I mean, if you go to a community of Taylor Swift fans and you try to convince them that Katie Perry is a better singer, it's not going to work. Yeah, perfect. Perfect analogy. You know, like Lady Gaga's stands are not going to, you know, in terms. embrace Katie Perry. Anyway, putting that aside. And it feels like that level of drama here. It does actually. Going and collecting all the great investors is a known blocking strategy that basically everybody does. When people buy your shares, then their opinion and who they voted for is that team. It's like buying season tickets, right? You're going to, if you bought season

tickets to the Warriors, you're a Warriors fan. If you bought it for the Lakers or a Lakers fan, you're going to root for that team. You're not rooting for another team. So, oh, Although I have sympathy for the bold CEO and how it feels to be on the other side of this kind of competitor with this kind of execution. I don't think it's a grand conspiracy. Right. That being said. Yeah. He got a little beat up and it seemed excessive.

It was a little weird to see the VC community, which is supposed to be above the fray. This is what I was taught coming into it. You know, is that if you're a VC have a little decorum. Yeah. And you don't pile on founders. It's just like, I don't know, classless. It's a power dynamic thing, right? Like you don't, especially if you have privilege,

you're in the position of privilege information, potentially. It doesn't, yeah. Yes. And this was when a Sequoia partner, which obviously I'm associated with Sequoia, Sean McGuire tweeted the following in response to Ryan's thread. I can't sit huddley by while this steaming pile of chocolate ice cream emoji goes viral. I like Ryan and have known him free gears.

That's that almost everything that's supposed to. from most importantly, the real reason why he struggled to raise is because his metrics haven't been good enough. Every round had metrics that were two rounds behind their competitors at the same time. And so this is the problem. This was a classless low blow from Sean. And I told him that publicly. Yeah. Jason replied with the following, this is not cool, Sean McGuire, even if you disagree with Ryan's thread, and it's easy to disagree. And I did on the podcast as a Top DC, you shouldn't take shots at this company or share their metrics. It's just not a classy move.

Sean replied, So I'm supposed to let someone outright lie and tarnish good people's name for their own motives? Make sense. Sorry, not how I roll. I call nonsense when I see it, which is kind of like what I do. So I appreciate that you're a full brawler. Also, I didn't say his metrics. I told the truthful reason why firms have passed on the company.

I looked at two rounds when I was at GV. So wait a second, I didn't share his metrics, but I did. Like, I mean, not sharing specifics is, that's a distinction without a difference. Okay, he didn't give the chart, but he basically gave you. He basically said why this company is not raising money at the pace it wants to, which is like, somebody confides in you and they're like, listen, you know, it would be like you're confiding with an attorney or, you know, like a divorced attorney, an attorney, a therapist, your doctor, and then they go and,

tweet it? Like, no, Sean, that's not how this works. You don't get to use the data you got in an investment meeting at GV under, you know, the rules of investing, which is you, you know, consider that information sacrosanct, right? It was told to you in this trusted space. Yeah. Wow. And then you got really mad, I see. VC code is clear. You don't weaponize. I'm quoting Jason, but I am not going to do an impression because I'm not an idiot. You don't have your Jason. Code is clear. If I could do like just enough of a Brooklyn accent, I would love to.

Yeah, exactly. You don't weaponize inside information to attack a founder or startup. How dare you, dude, seriously. It's hard enough to be a founder. You don't need a top VC attacking you like this with confidential information. Yeah, and that was the end of the conversation. Then he said into my, we talked in DMs. I think I slid into his DM and I was like, dude, seriously, you know, not cool.

And he's like, well, what am I supposed to do? And I'm just like, shut up is what you're supposed to do. Shut up and be a high profile VC with power dynamics. And you get to write the check. So just shut up. The other thing, I just want to have. Or you could just say you disagree with it like I did. You know, and you could talk about it without taking the inside information you got as a VC and using it and weaponizing it against the founder.

Because now founders are going to go, look, VCs like Sean share their, share our confidential information. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's it. I mean, honestly, I got to agree with you there. I think that's not. Well, also, let's be real. I don't think that metrics, even assuming that this is the case and we should not know this,

right, which is like, oh, your metrics came in under your competition. It seems to me as a relative newcomer here that metrics, it's not like everybody here is a quant investor. Metrics are not always the only decision making factor, right? Like they matter, but it is quite clear that there are times. when the founder matters, the addressable market matters, the growth potential matters, even more than like hitting your numbers week after week after week.

So I feel like not only is this an overshare, it might be a little bit disingenuous about the true reasons why people don't always get funded. Yeah. And of course, you know, then Gary Tan, who's like super nice guy, worked at Y Combinator and worked on Hacker News, and was in like the second or third class with posterists, which is a very cool startup that I used to love to use.

You know, great entrepreneur, great investor. He's saying, like, listen, the whole thing's just fiction. Hacker News doesn't,

like, vote down competitors. It doesn't need to. The community will just do that automatically. We're talking about this. It's the home team. Like, if you're on the Taylor Swift, you know,

subreddit, you're not going to have Lady Gaga. You're not quoting the Katie song. Yeah. The Katie and the Lady Gaga are not making to the number one slot. And so, you know, I sort of agree with that.

But then Mark and Driesen, of course, you know, who was classless, decides he's going to dunk on the founder as an investor in the company. And then he did that meme of the superhero, like Superman, having two choices to pick from work Fridays, blame stripe. And I just thought that was classless. But then I sort of tweeted like, well, but of course, it's Mark Andreessen. So that's kind of what he does. Anyway, he's just not, Mark's not over me turning him down for Hendryson Calicanus Horowitz. It was originally going to be ACZ.

they wouldn't do a CZ I said if it's not a CZ then I'm not in I'm out and it's just alphabetical guys well and it was like Horowitz was like no it's A16 Z you can be a partner you can get great economics but we're not putting you in the name of the firm and I was like well I'm out so no

they just never got over that so what can I say now you're blocked now blocked because I wouldn't join the firm maybe it's true if it's not we'll never know because Jason follows VC code and doesn't share. I mean, what's the point of me sharing that I was the original co-host of Pivot

and Tramoff and Jim Bancoff couldn't get me or Tramoff. And so they went with like the B team. I don't talk about like, I don't talk about parts I didn't get. You know how like actors. You know how like actors are reticent to talk about the parts they passed on because then the other person took the part and did a good job and they don't want people to, you know.

Yeah. You don't want to take away from the other person's performance. That's how I feel about it, you know, and this sort of thing. All right. Listen, when you're a founder, it's totally fun to trade war stories with other founders. And recently, Balloon CEO, Amanda Greenberg, one of my awesome portfolio companies, told me how Vanta's SOC2 solution helped her save an important deal in the final hours. I kid you not.

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V-A-T-A-com slash T-W-I-S-T. That's vanta.com slash twist for $1,000 off. Thanks, Vanta. Anyway, yes, so the pylon. Then Jason chimed in on the VC pylon. I will say like the meme, the production team rightly points out that this did upgrade the meme team a little bit, Mark Andreessen's. Like that was, it was actually all things aside, somewhat funny. The Jason then chimed in on the VC pylon. VCs are proving the Bolt founder correct by ganging up on him right on right now on Twitter, just classless.

And then you today tweeted about the best. Well, no, I just want to make a point on that. Like, he's saying that like all these VCs ganged up on me and there's a consistent. And then what did the VCs do? They confirm his own paranoia by mocking him and attacking him relentlessly with their huge followings. Yeah. Like, it's just better to shut up, you know, and just collect your money.

Stripes, $100 billion company, $200 billion company. You own 5% of it. Like, ensure you're $5 or $10 billion. Like, you don't need to go dunk on the other founder. It's just weird. Yeah. And then the, and then went on, you went on to say, like, look, if you want to, Bolt can beat Stripe, here's how.

So useful information, as opposed to just like yelling at folks. Patrick might not be happy. Then it got hilarious. Like, it really did. There were some funny tweets, I will say. If we're just going to engage in the kind of like the numeralama. Let me just unpack.

If you really want to be competitive, Ryan, here's what you do. Aside from working for fries, which is funny. If Stripe makes their money from their API, right? and from their transaction fees and like being the standard, just make a product that goes up against that and is free, right? So you take wherever their margin is. Like let's say they're making money because they get 1% of all transactions.

Like make it 25 basis points and just compete hard on that. In other words, destroy your competitor's margin. That's the move here. That's what I think is the move. Yeah. Are you listening? Do that. Which is what Internet Explorer did to Mark and Dresen's Netscape Browse.

I mean, you remember this, Molly. Like, it was like you would go to Comp USA and buy Netscape browser for 50 bucks. Yeah. You bought your browser. Long before Microsoft forced you to use it by bundling it with Windows, they made it free. They made it free. Yeah. Which then really screwed it more Andreessen's business.

That's how you, if you really want to fight the mafia, that's how you do it. That's like Elliott Ness, you know, you know, Chicago way. You get them on tax evasion. Take the knees out. basically take the Chicago way All right

let's go to give us some of the funny memes Let's go to the funny memes Let's have a dramatic reading of some of the tweets Telly in

on Twitter says You know it's actually crazy How much technologies change over time Netflix used to mail CDs Now they're a production studio is streaming

Amazon used to sell books Now they run the world's data centers Stripe used to be a payments API Now they're an Irish mob That's pretty funny actually. He has his moments deli and I give him credit. Ashley Mayer said

I once tried to compete with Tribe and woke up to find a severed unicorn head in my bed. I love played. Pretty good. Teddy blank. Stripe should put the Bolt guy's whole Twitter thread in their S-1, which cold

by our stock. We are hardcore. Logan, who's pretty good at the Twitter Bartlett, said, I seriously with Shiloka Valley was this badass. That's pretty funny, actually. That's good. Yeah, exactly.

And then Eric Newcomer, who is so, friend of the pod, so great. I was terrified for my life to say anything about this before now, but Stripe has been forcibly taking a cut of my revenue since I started my newsletter. He's in the protection racket for journalists. He's the protective racket. That's how his. Stripe is taking 75 faces points of his money every month for protection. Oh, that's hilarious.

I mean, they were excellent. Jordan Scales, Jay Dan on the Twitter, updated his LinkedIn. He's a software engineer at Notion, which is a great, great product that we love and use. And he was a senior software engineer at Stripe from November 2017 to August of 2020. And he put in his job capsule there. I was responsible for going on Hacker News and downloading our competitor. And finally, a hilarious tweet that you kind of have to see to really appreciate. from YC founder Robert J. Salvador,

which is a picture of all of them and a Photoshop of the Sopranos album cover, basically. The Strippanos. The Strippanos. It doesn't roll off the tongue perfectly, but to see it. To see like a bunch of nerds as, you know, like a mob family is kind of hilarious. It is a little bit hilarious. They're going to literally break your legs with their, API.

So, you know, it was, you know what? Sometimes it's a fun day on Twitter. The new PayPal Mafia. Like it's PayPal and then you've got this next generation, the Stripe Mafia. But congratulations to both of them for taking up the new cycle for two days in a row. Yeah, mission accomplished. We're done now. And we're done.

And seen. And mean, as we talked about in the production meeting, mean time to meme. Meantime to mean. Meantime to mainstream meme. The meantime to mainstream meme here was less than 24 hours. I mean, we literally got to like the afternoon of the accusations, and we were already meming it. As opposed to like with Chamoth on All In the other week,

I took a full like 48 hours to get to meme, meantime to mainstream memes. I think the stakes were a little higher on that one. Maybe. So there had to be some like legit, extremely upset. You know, and you're like, wow, how do you make kind of a joke about, well, also you'd have to try to figure out like, do I want to make a joke?

about this sort of ongoing genocide situation? Yeah, kind of hard to decide. This one was easy. I mean, that one about the tech companies, how Stripe had, you know, morphed into the Irish mob. That one was out minutes later, really. All right. We got to talk about my guy, Neil Young.

I'm a huge Neil Young fan. I know Neil. I'm not like besties or anything like that, but I've hung out with Neil, cool cat. And he told Spotify to remove his music over Joe Rogan's vaccine misinformation. This feels to be like a pandemic. peak moment. Like this might be the sign the pandemic's over,

but why don't you walk us through this? Interesting. That is an interesting direction for you to go with this. According to NBC News, because the letter has since been taken down, Neil Young posted this letter on his website called a message to Spotify, saying he wanted his managers and his record label

to let Spotify know that he wanted his music off of their platform. Rolling Stone said it's because, quote, according to Neil, Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines, potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them. He made it very clear that he was referring to Joe Rogan's podcast. Now, of course, this comes on the heels of a bunch of medical professionals, I think over a hundred, right, doctors basically

writing to Spotify, a few hundred healthcare professionals signed a letter to Spotify saying that Spotify needed to have a misinformation policy in place because, as they claim, Joe Rogan had Dr. Robert Malone on his show who promoted false COVID-Colid claims and theories. And this is, of course, in addition to Rogan himself, like getting COVID and saying, you know, I took the horse paste. Well, I mean, Ivorymactin is also used for humans. So they argue like taking the horse, if you, if you claim it's for just for horses, you're kind of also misidentifying it. Oh, I'm sorry. I like that my burden of truth here is higher than saying that it's okay to take a medicine that is sometimes used for horses. sometimes used for humans, but never used for COVID. Yeah.

But it's still, I should, you're right, I should be more specific while they just make things up and kill people. I bring it up. I'm not, I'm not dunking on you, but it's, that is totally what the internet would do, right? They'd be like, oh, actually, every making is using humans all the time. You are spreading disinformation. Yeah. Yeah. That's how they roll.

That's exactly how they roll. I mean, in fairness, like, I don't think anybody really understood exactly how to deal with a once in our lifetime pandemic because it's once in our lifetime. Like, none of us are experts and this one morphed like five times. Like, it is a hard, it is a hard topic to try to figure out, right? We've all had a hard time figuring out like what risk we're willing to take over time. Right? Yes, definitely.

And I think that if you have a once in a lifetime pandemic, two things are happening. One, you're absolutely right, right? Like a lot of the freak out that everybody's having is misdirected rage at the fact that the pandemic exists at all. Like, we don't want it to exist. We don't want it to be a reality that even if you don't think schools should be closed, the fact is some schools are going to close because they don't have enough warm bodies to keep school open right now. Right. Like, we don't want that to be true.

And so we are lashing out at the people who are trying to muddle their way through this the best they can. And do mess work. And also, right, right. Like, maybe they know, I mean, the way I look at it is like, there was no downside to wearing a mask. And then with Amacron, like, maybe it's pointless to wear a mask. Like, both of those things could be true. Both of those things can be true. And so even though it's true that we are upset about this pandemic and we are all having a hard time working our way through it.

And the longer it goes, the more society is really like fraying. Like, it starts to feel like society's coming apart a little bit at the seams. And also, some stuff is objective. untrue and is being promoted heavily by people with really big platforms. That is the issue with Joe Rogan. I look at Joe Rogan and I'm like, okay, I remember Howard Stern from my youth when I was growing up in New York, we talked about this on our private chat. He was incredibly controversial. He was a good interviewer. He was compelling to listen to. the government tried to censor him.

And all that did was draw more attention to him as being an authentic person. And people who hated him or liked him would listen to him more because at least they felt like the guy couldn't be censored and he was authentic. Joe Rogan is a huge Howard Stern fan, studied him, and then, I don't want to say copied it, but I think he evolved it into the podcast format and became the number one podcaster in the world, right? Right. When I look at it, I look at it.

Joe Rogan's a comedian. He'll have anybody on the show who's entertaining. That is his benchmark. Is a person entertaining? Not is the person correct? And they want to talk for three hours. He stole that long form thing because when people talk for two or three hours, yes, sometimes people will say things that they wouldn't have said in a 20-minute, you know,

controlled environment and sometimes hour two or three can be really compelling. But this is the guy. who's a comedian, MMA fighter commentator who hosted a show where people drank shakes of blended, disgusting worms, or cowt, or, you know, like, bull testicles or whatever. Like, he's the host of fear factor. Yeah. Like, why are we, all that is like, well, why are we talking about it? It was because, like, Spotify spent $100 million to acquire his content and make it exclusive. And now, Spotify is a is in the position of essentially having become a publisher, right? Because they've acquired this content and they're putting it out on their platform.

And there are legitimately questions now about how they're going to deal with content that may stray into this territory of like dangerous. And and I think what is particularly interesting is that everything is content, you know how, you know my theory on this. Everything is content and once it becomes content, it becomes moderation. There's always going to be pressure to moderate. I especially think this is interesting in the context of Neil Young, who the Noda gang is pointing out, had polio as a child, saying, like, attempting to apply this kind of like business-based peer pressure. Like, I don't want to be on this platform if this is going to be a platform that spends all of this money to acquire content that is potentially dangerous to its listeners. That I think is very interesting. And that happened with Howard Stern.

Like Howard Stern was on. Who, by the way, spoke out against Joe Rogan. He's like a pretty hard for anti-antibaxer. Like he would not be appreciative of this comparison. Well, actually, I mean, people make it all the time with him and he does not appreciate it. I think. But, you know, Howard also had that problem where people were threatening to leave CBS radio or, you know, because it was some big conglomerate that Melkarmazin was running.

And yes, it created a blowback in other places. And they also had on the radio, that woman who was, um, a homophobe. I forgot her name. I don't want to say the wrong name because, but she was like one of those talk radio hosts who felt like gay people were going to go to hell kind of thing. And it was like they had her on the platform too.

And so with Joe Rogan, I look at it and go like, he's interviewing somebody, but that doesn't mean he's endorsing them. And he's like, he's like a self. Well, no, but he has everybody on the program. He's a comedian.

Everybody on the program. Everybody. Like, he just had Jordan Peterson on. There's a whole thing on Twitter about the stupid seven-year-old crap that I like. He does. I mean, he has Alex Jones on who. Right. He is trending.

And there, you know, there was like a whole back and forth with Eric Swalwell, I think, somebody who had sent him a death threat in his DMs. And he was like, Joe Rogan Show is one of the places where I started to become radicalized. Right. Like, there's a drift. Because this is America right now, everybody's picking aside. And I think it is unquestionable that Joe Rogan, is picking aside.

I look at it and I'm just like, guys a comedian, he has a bunch of wacky people on. It's like, and he literally stole that whack pack concept, I think from Howard, which is Howard would have all these weird people on. And I think he has like his own whack pack,

which is like Alex Jones and previously Milo Unopolis and some of these, you know, whoever folks, I just don't, who is taking it so seriously and getting their medical advice from it? Really? I don't,

I don't think that influencing is a thing. I didn't get my, I did not literally get my, you know, health information from Howard Stern or Joe Rogan, you know, or any other comedian. That does not end that. That doesn't mean that other people aren't. People are. So what are we going to do? Like, you cancel Joe Rogan? I mean, maybe we should just be honest about Joe Rogan. Like, Joe Rogan is at times peddling misinformation that is dangerous to people. And then this becomes a business question, like separate again from the content. Yeah. This is a business question. for Spotify. And to what extent is it going to continue to be? Are they platforming misinformation? Is it potentially dangerous?

Do they want to be associated with that going forward? After they have set up basically their new model of we're going to spend a crap ton to acquire content, this is the kind of thing. What would you do if you were Spotify? Let me ask that. What do you think Spotify should do? Should they get rid of Joe Rogan?

Should they never have signed him? I mean, I'm not in that position and I'm glad I'm not. Yeah. I mean, I'm really glad I'm not. I think that it is a really easy solution. They should just go hire five scientists to start the all in of, you know, science and promoted, you know, side by side with Joe Rogan. And then those empower those people to take apart the claims on Joe Rogan. And that would be an incredible podcast. Imagine a podcast where they literally just fact check Joe Rogan every day and like had like after Joe Rogan, you know, kind of podcast. Like literally that, some, somebody must be doing that right now. So if two or three intelligent people got together and said, after Joe Rogan talks about science,

we're going to actually fact check. And they, because somebody was doing that at all in. I forgot who this account was. Yeah. They would fact check us. There's a lot of disinformation researchers, though, who say that that doesn't,

fact checking doesn't really work. It just like repeats the claims. Joe Rogan is always going to have a bigger audience than somebody who's like, I don't like Joe Rogan. I mean, there are already people in the chat. It were like, if Molly doesn't like Joe Rogan, then she's dead to me, right?

Like, it's not going to work. Like, everyone's going to be like, hmm, I heard a lot of compelling things in the three hours that I listened to this Joe Rogan show. Now I would like to spend some more time seeing if those things are true. Like, you believe him. Like, people, you know perfectly well that when people are fans, they believe you. They believe you. Sure. Maybe Spotify, honestly, I guess what I would do is just put a label on it.

Like this isn't, this is, like they do on editorials on TV or something. Like this content is not on. by Spotify, right? This is our... Or I wouldn't have a problem with that. If they said this show has disputed claims, here are those disputed podcasts and link to them. Like, that's kind of what Facebook has tried to do, walk the line. I don't think Joe Rogan would have a problem with that.

I think he would want to actually hear where he's wrong. Yeah. I think actually he would. I think he would have. I think everybody is now radicalizing in opposition to each other. And there's a personality type that the more opposition they encounter, the more they entrench. And that is that as this sort of like,

as the bookings go on, that seems to be a trend. I don't know that for a fact, right? But what I think you do see is people being like, in response to the reaction I am getting, I am digging in or I am radicalizing further. I mean, that's how radicalization works. You don't just do it in a vacuum.

You do it in opposition to some other force. Apparently, I'm just getting a note here from the producers, the number 23 podcast on Spotify is called Joe Rogan Universe, and it's by somebody named Adam Thorne, who is talking about Joe Rogan. So there it is. They're saying Joe Rogan Experience Review. His show is called Experience, I think.

I report review and analyze. See, now that's smart. Like, okay, use the Halo effect. Yeah. It also isn't, it doesn't say it's like a, it helps us get the most out of Joe's world-class show. So I think this is a fan pod, not a fact-check pod. But I would be very interested to see.

If somebody wants to have a top 100 podcast, just fact-checked Joe Rogan every day. I guarantee you it'll be in the top 200. Call Her Daddy is like a very sexually explicit one. And I think they have a disclaimer on that because it's sexually explicit. So I think, like, I don't mind the disclaimer thing. Labeling stuff is, yeah, that seems to be the best solution. And honestly, if people, you know, inside of, if the people inside of, if the people inside of Spotify cannot handle

they were like part of the music thing, but they can't handle the podcasting thing, they just quit. Like, just leave the company. Like, they're not changing, you know, after spending a half billion dollars on Gimlet, Ringer,

call her daddy, Joe Rogan, etc. They're not, they've decided to produce content. Yeah. The end. And now,

and this is just why I think this is so interesting as a matter of business. And now there's a, who's sorry now? Like, content is a mess. It is a messy business. And do not get in. And somebody's always yelling at you.

It's like being the president. It's the worst job in the world. Bob Eiger had the green light to buy Twitter and to buy BuzzFeed. And he bought Ether. Yeah. He bought Star Wars. He bought Pixar. He bought Marvel because he said, you know what?

These things are contained. He literally was going to buy Twitter. Can you imagine if Disney owned Twitter right now? God, no. The insanity, they would be like, oh my God. It would be like, the anti-brand. Mickey Mouse supports Nazis. And they would like screenshot like a Mickey Mouse Nazi tweet.

on Twitter and be like, how dare you publish this? It's like, it's an open platform. Yep. I mean, that's the other thing is like, podcasting is an open platform standard. It's like saying web browser. You say podcasting. It was until Spotify acquired it and made exclusive.

That's the part where you become a publisher. So yes, they made some of them exclusive, but you can still add any URL of an RSS feed to Spotify, Apple, etc. So I saw this bigger thing, which was like, we need to, you know, sensor and we need to, you know, these platforms need to stop allowing these podcasts. And it was like, they're not selecting them. The podcast is just a dumb player.

You can put any URL in the people just don't fundamentally understand how that works because there's like three things going on. You have buying content. You have featuring editorializing. Like here's some great content we're surfacing for you in curation. And then there's like, this is a web browser. you can put whatever you want into it like you can man this is the Wendy's

ma'am this is a way sir you're in a Starbucks there is an approval process I think though for podcast like on Apple Podcasts you have to submit it to be in the directory to be in the directory exactly but you can still put in any URL you want happen you can do that 100% three things happening

there's we we paid for this content and produced it and we own it right we curated it and we say hey this is a cool one you should check it out. So we're endorsing it, but we didn't pay to produce it. And then there's the third one, which is like,

it's, you could add whatever you want. You can add whatever you want. You literally could add a terrorist organization, Nazi organization podcast to Apple pliers. By the way, Microsoft, you can also open a Nazi website,

white supremacist's website in Internet Explorer, whatever they call their browser now. Edge? What is the browser? Just call an Internet Explorer and stop changing the name of it. of the browser. Also, stop trying to get me to use Edge. Bless you.

I know we talked about the... I know. Would you like to switch your browser? Would you like to switch? No, if I wanted to switch my browser, I'm going to settings and switch it. Stop asking. I really don't want to.

Chrome. Here's my thing. Ask once. I'll let you ask once. Apple, Microsoft, Chrome, everybody. Ask me one time. Stop asking me to change my browser. Are you sure?

So, Justin says with Spotify, you cannot add any RAN. RSS. That's not true. And listen to it. I don't believe that's true because Patreon makes custom feeds when you pay for something, Patreon custom RSS feed, Spotify. You're telling me if you pay for something, it will not work.

You pay for a Patreon custom feed, it's not going to work? I don't think so. I don't know. In Spotify, yes. They recently did a partnership or anchor introduced the feature that you can, get access to paid feeds through their mechanism, but I can't just copy, paste my anchor RSS,

write my Patreon RSS feed and drop that in Spotify, as far as I know. Add an RSS feed to Spotify. Log into podcasters a Spotify, click on your show, click on your show, that's if you're the show producer. That's your show. That's your show.

That's to submit. How do I manually? Hmm. Yeah. Is that true? Noties, let us know. Mm-hmm. Yeah, you may be right. Does Spotify really not support? I'm on a, I'm on a Reddit thread. Does Spotify really not support us? No, they're lacking many of the best functions of all the podcast is. It really is ridiculous. Because it's not really a podcatcher or even a browser. It is a Spotify is a content aggregator. Like, again, this is why I think that's so interesting as a business question. They're a content aggregator, not a browser.

and not even like a search, right? Especially in more and more and more as they start to acquire stuff and make it exclusive. And that's why, like, I almost wonder if that wasn't. And frankly, there's been a lot of reporting that says it's not even the best thing for the people who got these deals. Like, their traffic is dropping because it's exclusive. Like, I just, I wonder. That's why we didn't, that's why we didn't do it with all in. I would say which platforms courted us.

But we were courted early on when people saw it jump into the top, you know, 100 or 200 pods. They were like, hey. And this week in startups, we've had people, you know, make overtures and stuff like that. And I was like, listen, we want to be indie. There's a reason where indie. We do not want to limit where people see it. And, you know, and then every platform is like, hey, what you do it? And I was like, there's really two things I want to work on.

YouTube and RSS feeds. Anything that's not those two, I think, you know, is, you know, very secondary. Like, you can explore marketing on Twitter and TikTok, but like, no, I don't want to build your platform. No. I want open standards. Yeah. Totally. Me too. And when you don't, and you know, for years and years and years, this question of publisher versus platform has been plaguing these platforms. And the closer they get to publisher, the more they find themselves in these. This is the problem I've had with Spotify. And I've talked to Daniel about it over and over again.

Most recently, when we were now part of their video project. And they're like, you have to use anchor. And I was like, I don't want to use Anchor. We have an artist. assess feed or ready for video. Just take that. And they're like, you have to use anchor. I was like, no, I don't want to use anchor. And I just, I emailed Daniel and the anchor CEO.

And I was like, why are you breaking podcasting standards? This is why people hate Spotify. You keep breaking the standards. And they're like, no, no, we're going to do it. It's just now just for the beta. And I was like, really? Is it just for the beta? Or because I'm calling you out on breaking podcasting standards,

you know, are you telling me you're going to do it? So I like, I think I'm having a little influence on Daniel by constantly telling him, like, listen, Daniel, you're hated by the podcasting community for a reason. You keep breaking podcasting centers. The fact that they don't allow you to add a URL to Spotify is ridiculous. Clip this, send it to the anchor CEO, send it to Daniel. This is stupid. If Apple and Google and everybody else let you add a spot of your own custom RSS feed, then just do it Spotify. Stop trying to break podcasting. It's offensive. Like we built podcasting, you're benefiting from podcasting, but you want to break open standards, like anchor,

CEO, Daniel C, Spotify, CEO, please stop with the breaking of the podcasting standards. If you want to court podcasters, then support the open standards. Explicitly. Enough. No, I just really get pissed off about it. We were here. Well, no, but we love it. I'm just like not saying a word because, yeah.

We were here first. We were here first. We created that standard. We built the standard. We built this. Don't break it. It's not broke. Don't break it.

And Apple walked the line for a long time. Like they created an ecosystem, but they did not break it. They curated it. They made a directory. They wouldn't give anybody any metrics. Like they, for a long time, I mean, I say this all the time. In fact, I told my son the other day, he was like, somebody, somebody invented podcasting. I was like, no, no, no.

I invented podcasting. Right. Like Adam and Dave Weiner invented an enclosure. And then in 2005, Tom Merritt and I at CNET started what became the first commercially successful podcast. Full stop. Full stop. The model that we are doing right now was me and Tom Merritt at CNET.

And then advertisers were like, huh, Apple seems to control this whole thing. And like we can't get any metrics. They're like, on a website, I can tell when like a bird flies by. But on a podcast, I can only tell if you download it. And I don't know if you listen and I know. And so the bottom fell out. And everybody got out of podcasting for like, a decade until finally like NPR came along and was like, well, we don't have to care that much

about money. So we're going to do this and reinvigorated this space. Except for me. I was here the whole time too. I just was like, listen, we're going to make an estimate. You don't get to tag the users. This is my big problem with Anchor. I was like, Anchor, I don't want to give you, I don't want to have an anchor fee because I don't want you tagging and studying our users. I want people to have their privacy. And, you know, everybody is trying to then invade the podcast listeners privacy. And I don't like that. I don't want our users and listeners to be in some database. And they assured me that they're not going to put our users in a database and sell ads against them or try to. Because Apple, you know, the short version of that is Apple almost killed podcasting once by trying to strangle it in an ecosystem.

Spotify is risking the same thing. And frankly, I think exclusive content, is part of that. I'm okay with them. I don't love it. I don't love it, but I respect the rights of the content creator to do an exclusive if that's in their best interest

and that's what they want. Yeah. Right? Like if you're the ringer and the ringer says, you know what? I want my payday. You know,

and Bill Simmons wants to get paid. I'm happy for him. If Joe Rogan wants to get paid, call her daddy wants to get paid, fine. That's their choice. And what I like about that, Molly, is when those three people come out of the top rankings,

that moves the next group of people up. So like you can't whoever, anybody. Yeah, no, but it's true though. Joe Rogan was number one on Apple, right? And now he's not. Right. So does it ever benefit the creator? That's my question.

It actually goes back to the conversation yesterday. Yeah, but then you get a big paycheck once and then you fade over time as opposed to potentially continuing to grow. Which is exactly to go full circle what Howard Stern did. Howard Stern was like, the satellite radio people were like, listen, you're, I think Howard was reaching like 10 million people at the peak, maybe 20. It was like he was the most listened to. You remember his influence during that 90s period for some period of time. Huge. You know, he was huge. He would have, he would sell a million. He was like Oprah. Like,

Oprah and him could move him, you know, a million books if they had somebody on or sell out a concert or make it the number one movie of the weekend. And then they gave him like a quarter billion dollars to move over to Sirius. Serious got two million paid subscribers. Two million people paying $10 a month is a quarter million dollars a year. They basically passed that money on to Howard. Sirius basically bought him into irrelevancy. Yeah. He lost 90% of his audience and he got paid.

That's why I'm in it for the influence. I'm in it for as big of an audience as possible. So that's why I say no to all these deals. Yep, exactly. That's what I mean. I think long term it's better for the platform than it is for the creator. But I would like my TV show. I mean, seriously, when are they going to put Jason Calacanis on TV?

Like, I had a TV show. Let's go. I mean, what's my TV show? That's why TV ever wants you. I had a reality show on NBC. We did a pilot and everything. It's just my partner on it turned out to be a monster. Yeah.

Anyway, we don't talk about that anymore. All right. Your day, we're going on. A lot of tea. But yes, you know what the problem is? It's just too much work to work with the TV people. Oh, yeah. It's terrible. It's just so much. You've had TV deals, I guess, right? Or like, people

go. Yeah, exactly. And people, and, you know, I was trying to, like, I had a half hour broadcast quality show on CNET that I was trying to get CBS to pick up when I worked there. Like, oh, I shouldn't even, things I shouldn't say, but whatever, who cares it was years and years and years and years ago. Like TV, nightmare. It's a nightmare. It's a nightmare. They want to water everything down. They want to break it. That's why I like the streamers. So, like, I have, I want to do, anyway, I'll talk to you about it off here. I'm with Sebastian here. Death to the Intermediary. I mean, that's exactly what these platforms are, right? In the next decade, content creators and consumers,

no middleman controlling the taps. That's basically what's happened. I mean, that's basically what's happened. I wouldn't mind being on HBO Max or like a Netflix show. I wouldn't mind that. I have a great idea for a Netflix show that's basically like an HGTV style show where you decarbonize your house, but it's like a makeover, like decarbonizing makeover.

That's a great idea. Right? Decarbonizing, yeah. Like sustainable living with, yeah. Sustainable makeover. It can be sexy. I'll talk to my agent. I don't have an agent anymore.

I get called by all these people. You have an agent or you don't have an agent? Sort of. But I'm like in the hip pocket of an agency as opposed to like a signed deal. Yeah. They just come to me and pitch me on stuff once. That was the time of the show when we overshare, by the way. Yeah.

Anyway, it's just so much easier to do your own thing. Is there anything else in the news that we need to talk about here? I don't think so. Come on. We ended on such a great rant, great Jason rant. Yeah, I think it's a great Jason. We planted our flag in podcasting. I will say just in the startup space, there's a company called Scratchpad.

It's kind of like, I'm told, superhuman for Salesforce. They just raised $33 million Series B. I've never seen this, but it was led by my Bestiac Craft. And I don't know what the valuation was, but I think people know Salesforce as like a legacy kind of app. You know, it's, it's been around for a long time. Therefore, it may not have the freshest interface and this new concept of superhuman and notion, these really clean interfaces. It's like it's funny how you can build a business.

It's basically like an iteration on a big existing product that should be better and isn't. And then your scratch pad and you raise $33 million. Startup of the week, by the way. This is what's happening here. We need a sting for that too. Yeah, so anyway, I think it's very interesting. I don't know anybody who uses it. I haven't seen it, but I do think that you can make a new interface,

a modern interface on top of an existing product really does create some magic. Yeah. And I think it's like, I don't have a category for this startup concept, but I like it. So what's a website, Molly, that has a ugly, disgusting, horrific interface? that could look gorgeous and modern like notion and superhuman. Amazon. That was the first one that came to mind for me.

It's Amazon. Really? Yeah, I was just thinking if somebody made a gorgeous... Why is it very terrible? All right, this is a good idea. Okay, so here's what I want. This is a great idea.

I want some design... Did Charles say the same thing simultaneously? Charles said the same thing, yes. We're like Amazon. Wow. So this is my RFS request for startup. Yes. I'll give you $100,000 and our accelerator will work on

this together. My request for startup is somebody builds a front end that is stunningly gorgeous for Amazon and maybe two other at-scale platforms for shopping. Yep. And lets you build cards. Yeah. So this interface could imagine a gorgeous interface that look beautiful on your desktop. And when you search for something, um, uh, ski equipment, right? Like, uh, you're looking for a pair of ski goggles. All of a sudden, a gorgeous interface comes up with the ski goggles from Amazon and Walmart and whatever. Etsy. And you just, whatever. Etsy. Some sort of meta search engine. And then you can add it to your carts and you authenticate with, you know, all five platforms. And it could be like a browser extension. That makes us gorgeous. And then you just get the affiliate fees from those places.

Yeah. That would be a good enough business. And then roll in a decent freaking recommendation engine on top of that because not only does Amazon have a truly terrible AI, but its recommendation engine still is astonishing. Amazon's recommendation is just scary. It's scary. I feel like they're like reading my, wait, you think it's bad? Oh, I always. Total garbage.

I'm like, first of all, stop recommending me a product that I already bought. Second, if I search for a product and then I buy it and then I send it to, to like my mom in North Dakota, why are you still recommending that product to me? Your AI is not smart enough to know. I said that to someone else. You're talking about those edge. What I'm talking about is after I buy some.

I'm like, I don't want any of this. You know what they bundle the three things together? Okay, so I'm not talking about the homepage experience. I actually agree on the homepage experience. They don't surface great stuff. I, when I'm on the product page and they're like, buy these three things together. Yeah.

I always find the two other things are super relevant. And then if you page down, They build that little comparison where they're like, here's what you're looking at, this anchor battery pack, and then here are the four or five knockoff so I can be like, oh, yeah, those suck. Or, oh, that one does look better. I think that's actually how I found anchor.

I was looking at some battery pack, and then anchor came up as a competitor, and I was like, well, that looks like, it's got better specs, and I clicked on it and went there. Right. So I like their skew page, but I agree, their homepage, like their news feed is not. No, it's terrible. Like the actual shopping recommendation

just hysteria. It's actually laughable at this point. Like, I agree with that at the homepage. Yeah. Yeah. I also have been pitched over and over again on the concierge service. I, you know, where somebody helps you find what you're looking for, helps you make a decision. I always thought that that would work at some point. And a wirecutter is probably the best manifestation of it. But I do think there's a startup idea. Let me run this one up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes. Let's put this in the toaster and see if it gets golden brown. here's what I'm thinking. You know how the wire cutter? Yum, yum. You know how the wire cutter? Like, you just feel like,

all right, if I pick on the wire cutter now on by the New York Times. And apparently the water cutter people. Well, yeah, the New York Times is kind of like, oh, you work for the wire cutter. We pay you half as much as the New York Times writer. So like, but we work twice as hard. They're like, yeah, but no. You're not fancy.

You're not journalists. You're not journalists, even though you do a better job. Let's be honest. Um, they really is pretty amazing that they just do not value the wirecutter people. And it's like, they print money and like, they're better than the journalists at the New York Times at what they do. Like, how could you, how could you make them second class citizens inside the New York Times? I guess because they can. It's not just weird that they're like so pro-union at the New York Times and so liberal and they hate their own unions.

The leadership of the New York Times is not pro-union at all. That was a freaking dog fight at the New York Times. So then the wirecutter comes in, they do not relate. Let me tell you, as somebody who wrote about technology at the New York Times, that is not a coverage area that they have any respect for. Like, they have started to have respect for it now because it's like, oh, is Facebook really detrimental to democracy? Fun story forever.

But like product stuff and did they want unions? Absolutely not. I was hoping three or four of those wirecutter people would just come up with a new product idea and pitch me because I tried to invest in Brian's company 10 times. When he was at like a $10 million valuation, he was making like a million dollars. I was like, let me put $2 million into this. And then he wants up selling for like, what do he sell for $30 million or $40 million? And I understand.

He owned 80% of it. So like, congratulations. But I was just like, oh my God, don't sell this thing. Like I can I can help you get $5 million in secondary shares. Sell your personal shares to an investor. I'll put $2 million. I begged him not to do it. I like asked him four times.

had totally forgotten about this, but I remember now that his whole deal with wirecutter was that he didn't want to, it's such an interesting founder story because he didn't want to grow it. It was almost like Craigslist, where like once it got, once Craigslist existed,

Craig was like, I'm never iterating on this thing again. And Brian was like, I want to live in Hawaii and just let the wirecutter run itself. And then I'm sure that he was like $30 million, great, that's a win. And now if you like open up the wirecutter in a browser and then open up the spruce.com in the next tab over,

because they're doing, effectively, the spruce is a home recommendation site. So they do a lot of what wirecutter does, aggregated content just for your home. And they do product recommendations. And lately what I've discovered is all of the SEO takes me to the spruce before the wirecutter. And look how freaking beautiful it is. Pretty good.

The one I'm looking at their, my go-to. And now I'm like spruce for everything. Too many ads. But okay, yeah. Look at that, the spruce. Yeah, I'm looking at that. the electric heaters. And that's a really good tell for me if it worked. And they literally copied the wire cutter format. Yep. They did it a little bit better. But it's pretty. Maybe. It's prettier.

Maybe. I don't know. They have better SEO too somehow. Like they're coming up a lot. They're really, they're kicking. Maybe we just invest in that. Maybe we should just invest in the spruce. I believe in, maybe they've already raised money. But anyway, here was my idea. Yeah. You have these people who are, you know, experts. Maybe we just do this on this thing we can start up. But anyway, you have these people who are category experts. And they need what? Like, to do that review of the electric heaters,

what would you need to resource to do that, Molly? In terms of like cost, you have to buy them, right? So you have to spend $1,000 on electric heaters because you don't want to get them for free. Yep. So you got $1,000 in electric heaters you have to buy. And then what do you have to do? You have to hire somebody test it.

one to two testers, depending, like, do you want a let, you want consumer report style lab stuff, or do you want individual reviewer with anecdotal, you know, so then you probably need a lab that could be, that could be real estate and lab installation. Or it's got out of somebody's home,

and that person, you know, exactly. So what would it take to do that? How many weeks slash, how many editorial days would it take to make a spruce page or a wire cutter page on electric eaters and to test it?

and to test it. Yeah, that whole process. And so you're, and you're popping up the website from zero or the website already exists? Let's just assume I wanted to make that one page. Forget about building the website, building the team.

Just one page on, here are humidifiers, here are our phone chargers, here are electric heaters. So we'll stick with electric eaters. How long does it take that writer? How many days to do the electric heater review and make that great page?

I'm going to say, to make this great page, you could do it in two weeks. Your review would be a little, So 10 days would be light. The primary time here that's built in is the time with product, right? The getting it in, figuring out some installation if it's like an actual appliance, and then having a proper amount of time to test it, minimum a week. Okay.

Like most beautiful and well thought out a month. Got it. So you buy 10 of them for whatever it is, 100 bucks each on average. You spend a day working on each one and then you spend another week getting your thoughts together and architecting and then a week polishing it and publishing it. So it's 20 editorial days and that editoria would get paid what? A thousand bucks a week, two thousand bucks a week, 1500 bucks a week, something like that.

Yeah, something like that. So 1500 bucks a week. So each of those pages cost $6,000 in editorial cost and $1,000 in $1,000 in buying the products. So $7,000. Yeah, yeah. I'm just saying per, I try to think. unit economics when I'm going through business.

Exactly. So it's $7,000 per product. $7,000 per product page. Yep, exactly. Inclusive of what the writers get paid. So somebody from the wire cutter or the spruce or somebody who formerly worked there, can they DM me and Molly? You can just DM us together.

I mean, I do know some people that seen it, which is still doing this already. So here are. So here's what I want to do. I want to run a test. DM us and tell us. No, no, I want to. I want to poach somebody. So I want to poach somebody.

Okay. Okay. Looks like Consumer Reports has 130 research or scientist, engineers, testing experts. I want to hire somebody to do this for us and give them the seven grand and make it into a podcast episode where you and I talk to them about, you know, their reviews. And then we just have a landing page. This week and Startups.com slash phone chargers slash TVs. You know, whatever. You want to get into reviews?

Like what? I love products. You love products. I love product. But I don't want to do any of the work, and I don't want you doing any of the work. Really? Because I'm so excited about my EV reviews. When's my EV review coming out?

Well, I don't know. That's to producer Charles. Actually, so the EV reviews, let's use that as a test case for both audience and advertiser interest. Because, yes, we do love product. And frankly, we already sold out. Ooh, and how could we integrate this with like a product hunt or even like a, how can we turn this into an investment opportunity? They're trying out like brand new stuff potentially. Who wants to fly?

In the drone. Yeah, this is what I want to do. I want to have the This Week in Startups Reviewer. Yep. Come on. Tell us like, hey, listen, and the This Week in Startups Lab, we did X, Y, and Z, and here's what came out of it. And this is the one you should buy.

And then you and I would ask them probing questions, make sure they did a good job. And then that's it. You know, there are a ton of creators doing this. We could find a creator and partner with them. Yeah. Yeah, find us a creator. If anybody wants to do this, pitch us. I'd like to try it.

And then, of course, the EV reviews, but that's a, a whole other ball away. That's a whole other thing. Yeah, that's part of my decarbonization can be sexy strategy. Doing a car review, I think that's also like a 10 full days, five to 10 full days when car and driver does it. What do they spend? Or even a month. They do like the long term ones now that are six months. And yeah, I mean, I think a month minimum to do a real fully fledged car review, right? Not the like, you'll see when my Audi review comes out. It's like I had it for two weeks. I did like a two to three minute video. Like, sure, fine.

I think Consumer Reports is a public company. I'm sorry, a nonprofit. Because I was going to try to buy it at some point when I was doing Engadgett and something like, somebody figure out how we buy this thing. And they're like, hey, schmuck, it's a nonprofit. You can't buy it. I was like, everything's for sale. Get me the editor and cheat.

And they were like, these people are weird, man. You can't. They're not perfect. They're just like a bunch of weird people in Connecticut or something. I forgot where they were. And they're like, you can't buy these people. They're just what. Consumer Reports has that I did not know.

actually is a really big government relations team, and they do a ton of policy and lobbying stuff. They turn a lot of the safety stuff into policy recommendations, and they've got a whole, like, Washington relationship thing that's very interesting. Yeah. I don't know about this organization. I wonder what their whole budget is. Oh, here we go. We have it. Wait.

Amounts are in thousand. Subscriptions, newsstand, and other sales, $226 million. Mm-hmm. It's way bigger than you think. They're too, yeah. Holy cow. Mm-hmm. Wow.

There's got to be somebody who worked at one of these three organizations that we can poach to run this for us, Molly. For sure. Because we're sold out already. Our advertisers are sold out. They're happy. This would be like a neat thing to do on the show. I love those product reviews. You love product reviews.

It'd be good. Let's start our own web. Great. Love it. Fun. All right, everybody. That's it. There's enough show for one day.

Totally is. All right. I have one thing that you should see, Jason. Oh, no. That came out during the recording. Uh-oh. What is it? Wait, am I going to see it on live?

Or are you playing a video or something? Oh, no. That's the work Fridays. Oh, no. Wait, Mark and Driesen, did that's below my line? To you. Oh, to you. He tweeted it at you.

He quote tweeted your original tweet. Kind of gross for a big VC to do. up on a founder, but then again, it is Mark. And he, but he's not following me. How did he do that? He probably unblocked you to just drop this. Oh, so that's the same strategy he does with Jack. He unblocked Jack. Wait, can you drop the Twitter link in here? This is really hard to see on our little

screen here. Yeah, yeah. Oh my God. He's not blocking me anymore. So he unblocked me. Take this opportunity. Say everything you've been wanting to say, go, go, go. I could just, I could just, uh, I'm no, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a screenshot of it. And that I'm going to do this guy. What was Jack's tweet? He said like this guy unblocked me just to get me Jack's exact tweet and I'll just cut and paste that. Remember Jack said this guy untweeted me, unblocked me just to do this lame tweet? Yeah. This guy unblocked me just to share the lamest tweet in the world. CCHI Jack. Oh, no.

Oh my God. You know why this is so contentious, Molly? No. Because there's so little at stake. Right. Totally. Because it doesn't matter. Because it literally doesn't matter.

It's just a bunch of rich people acting stupid. So pull up mine, Nick. I just did mine. This is mine. Let the tweet wars continue. There's nothing at stake. It's so funny. Mark and Jason's a trip.

he's actually a secret fan I'm told by his like I would say who but let's just say I have people inside the building I've got my people inside the building and Mark Andreessen loves J-Cal and he loves all-in pod and the fact is he copied my playbook

of doing podcasts and he none of his pods can beat any of my pods the end or our pods no Sorry, oh, where's Andreessen Hartwood's in the ranking? Oh, yeah. How much? I know, we're just really just like, 30 billion dollars in assets under management.

And they can't, they can't even be, they can't even come close to either of the pods we do. Come on, Mark. Just pack it in, kid. Just collect your money and retire. All right, there it is. This might be my favorite show of the whole almost month that I've been here right now. It's the part where we literally just hang out. I didn't sleep last night.

I drove up to Tahoe at the middle of the night. I had to get up early and make eggs for the kids. I mean, I lost my internet. It's just been crazy. All right, everybody, there's been an amazing show. For Mollywood, I'm Jake. You've earned it.