This Week in Startups - Netflix earnings breakdown, Kushner’s $3B pitch deck, CNN+ on pause, Grubhub for sale | E1439

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

First, we break down Netflix's earnings and discuss where Netflix’s content strategy might have gone wrong (2:46). Then, Jason pitches Jared Kushner’s leaked PE firm fundraising deck (35:15). We wrap with a discussion of Warner Bros. Discovery possibly killing CNN+ (56:27) and Just Eat Takeaway announcing they are looking into selling Grubhub, 10 months after finalizing a $7B acquisition (1:13:21)! (00:00) Jason and Molly intro today’s news show (02:46) Netflix reported a drop in subscribers for the first time ever in their Q1 earnings report (13:54) OpenPhone - Get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at https://openphone.co/twist (15:14) Netflix vs. other streaming platforms (24:47) Coda - The All-in-one doc for teams, get a $1,000 credit at https://coda.io/twist (26:06) Does Netflix need to take more risks with content? (34:11) Odoo - Get your first app free and a $1000 credit at https://odoo.com/twist (35:15) Jared Kushner’s $3B VC pitch deck was leaked by The Intercept… it’s exactly what you might expect (56:27) Axios reports CNN+ is already in danger of being canned 3 weeks after launch (1:13:21) Just Eat Takeaway announced they’re looking to sell Grubhub after finalizing $7.3B acquisition of the company just 10 months ago (1:22:22) WeLove Adam Neumann (1:25:06) All In Summit 30 days away FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis  FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Okay, everybody, welcome to this weekend startups. Earning season is starting up again, and so we're doing another new show because there's so much of it. Yeah, and we'll be covering all of these different earnings and looking at the why behind it. And first up today, we have Netflix showing a huge loss in net subscribers for the first time ever. Stock down 35% now.

What a miss. Absolutely brutal. We have a great conversation about Netflix. Netflix's content strategy and where they might have gone wrong. We have a lot of thoughts. I'm just saying we're here to be put on retainer because we got ideas for you. And then Jason and trust me, you want to stay for this. Jason goes ahead and pitches Jared Kushner's leaked VC deck.

That is a real thing that I just said, unlike everything that is said in the pitch deck. It's the worst pitch deck ever done. And I have a hard time getting through it. I mean, it's the craziest word salad. but he raised two or three billion, so go figure. He knows something I don't. Finally, two crazy stories back to back. Two huge disasters in the business space.

It seems like everything is people flipping the car right now. CNN Plus might be on the chopping block just three weeks after launching. And we're going to cover Just Eats and their acquisition of Grubhub, which just happened. And now they want to sell the company? I don't understand what's happening in the world. Everything is coming apart. everything is coming apart and that's why you need our amazing show. So stick with us. You're going to learn a lot of things here today. Lots to learn. This week in startups is brought to you by Open Phone.

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Startups can get a $1,000 credit at coda.io slash twist. And Odu. Odo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps. that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. Your first app is free forever. And right now, O-D-O-D-O-S-O-S-Twas offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at O-D-com slash twist. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-O-com slash twist. Hey, everybody, welcome to your Wednesday episode of this week.

And Start-Ups with me, of course, is my co-host with the most. So, partner. So partner. So partner. Molly Wood. She was just on CMEC talking about Netflix. I'm going to talk about it here. Netflix, I don't know what happened.

All of a sudden, my Twitter stream went bonkers. And I saw the headline down 200,000 subscribers, on expected growth of 2.5, and the stock tanking 25%. Molly, what is going on here? Why did Netflix miss their numbers so brutally? What's the background here? Gang.

So this is, we should say, Netflix's first ever drop in net subscribers. So that all by itself is a shock to investors, right? That like after only ever growing, it turns out these numbers can go down. It is astonishing, though, that it sounds like investors were still expecting effectively pandemic-type growth. They were expecting two and a half million additional subscribers. And then Netflix was like, actually, we lost 200,000 because we raise prices at exactly the wrong time, which we can discuss in a minute. This is overall Q1 revenue increased 9.8% year over year to 7.9 billion. That is growth.

They didn't lose money. They lost subscribers, but it's growing at a much lower rate than Q1, 2020. When they grew at 24.2%. Net income was $1.6 billion. rating margin was 25%, which was not a drop in performance. We actually have a clip, if we want, of the CEO, Reid Hastings, co-CEO, I believe. Read Hastings trying to make sense of these numbers, about 38 seconds. Okay. Let's hear from Reid. COVID created a lot of noise and how to read the situation, you know, boosted us a lot in 2020. And then in 2021, I think we, you know,

thoughtfully said it was mostly pull forward, which was the logical conclusion. But now coming in the 2022, that doesn't really hold. So then pushing into it, we realized, you know, with all of the account sharing, which we've always had, that's not a new thing. But when you add that up together, we're getting pretty high market penetration. And that combined with the competition is really, you know, what we think is driving the lower acquisition and lower growth. So this is a hot-bud issue, the sharing of accounts. They have made it very simple, and they've never policed people adding accounts. Because like Microsoft or Adobe in the past, what they realized was the people who are taking the time to pirate software previously, steal MP3s previously, or piggyback on their parents or friends' Netflix accounts, those people probably didn't have the extra money available to buy it.

or they eventually would and they would not want to share because they wouldn't want to share their preferences or whatever. There'd be some reason to offboard them, but in a growth situation, if you're growing anyway, it's kind of like you're marketing to those people

and you're part of the zeitgeist. In other words, they're using Windows or they're using Photoshop and eventually they'll wind up paying if they get enough value from it. So there's just sort of like, be a little permissive.

It's okay to have a little bit of leakage. Yeah. Now what they're realizing is, When you start to hit what I call the natural audience for any service, in other words, the people who need it. When you have 100% penetration of those people, like we do for phones and laptops and internet connections, movie theaters, Barnes & Nobles, Starbucks, you hit saturation. When you hit saturation, okay, how do you deal with that? You either have to find a new market. And listen, they've got libraries in Latin America, Europe, in Asia.

They're really going for it internationally, and that's been a big focus for them. So they did realize, hey, let's find new subscribers in new locations because we're going to reach saturation in the United States like Facebook did, right? So then you have a choice. One, you can charge more for the product. Okay, check, they did that over and over and over again until people were like, wait, what am I paying? Right. Which is interesting in and of itself that people don't know, like what they're paying for the service, which is a sign that the service is good. Right?

We talked about this with Amazon Prime. It's so good. If they doubled the price, increased the price 10%, like there's some percentage that you might be annoyed, but you're not canceling. So that's pretty great product market fit. And then the second thing you do is you would look for that leakage and breakage, and you would start charging for that,

people who are sneaking into the amusement park, so to speak, or using counterfeit product. And so that's what they're doing is they're just sort of cleaning up those last little bits. Now, if you do introduce friction, in other words, okay, we know this is one household with one IP address and the second IP address in another time zone is using it. Okay, that's an easy one. Different time zone, different IP range, turn it off.

And then people could fight over it and say like, oh, that's me. I was traveling. My husband was traveling. My wife was traveling. My kid was traveling. But when you see it every day, okay, so in 30 days, 10 days in another IP address, 10 instances in another geo, you could start to say, hey, your account's been suspended,

wherever, but that also creates a lot of user animosity and friction as you go to turn those things up. It's not a perfect science, in other words. Like, if you own two homes, what do I do if I own a second home? Do I pay for two Netflix? Is that what Kulu is doing to me right now. I can't get Hulu to work on my Apple TVs in the second

home. They're like, you switch your locations too many times. You can only switch locations four times, but then it works fine on my phone. So then I'm mirroring, like, it's just too complicated and complex. So I think there's going to be a big cleanup. project to attract the most value. And then obviously competition we'll talk about in a second. Yeah, no, I totally agree.

And I will tell you that it's interesting because that Hulu, that specific Hulu thing, I mean, that's such an easy solve, right? Just get an authentication process to show that it's you, Jason, and not you different house. Like that that is just like, and it's been driving me crazy that Hulu does that because it's like, dude, I'm just in a different location. You could authenticate me via two factor or facial recognition. you know, like, give me a break here. Two-factor, it'd be fine, yeah.

Two-factor would be fine, yeah. In the case of Netflix, like, this was the year, I think, and I've been saying it on this show, like this was the year that Netflix got pay attention expensive. And so then they have an earnings report where they got pay attention expensive. I, like, cut the 4K. I was like, I don't need the 4K, give me a freaking break, right? I actually cut it down because I was like, this is too expensive. And then you find out that you've got 100 million people sharing passwords.

And Netflix is like, they're freeloaders and I'm subsidizing them as a person who is now paying pay attention money monthly for this service. When on top of that, the content is constant, but it's not premium. So I'm paying. So I feel like Netflix like doubled down on growing in all the wrong ways, one through the freaking black hole of more and more and more content, which you actually have to figure out how to innovate on the content you have. and then on top of that just kept getting more expensive. So now I'm paying like gourmet grocery prices for Safeway. And it just doesn't make sense.

So that is the second issue. Like there, and this is the thing I don't understand. The 700,000 that went down, I remember them saying 700,000 people in Russia have been removed from the service. Now, when did that occur? Did that occur during this or after this time period? Because that would also be material. and I didn't hear it come up.

So this is Q1 earnings report, and it's April now. But it's still 2.7 million users off either way, right? Because they had expected 2.5 million user growth, and instead they reported to 200,000 loss. So either way, even if they kicked a bunch of Russians off. But if they lost 700,000 due to, if they lost 700,000 due to Russia, then it would be a gain of 500,000. So they would have hit 20% of their 2.5 million. So that's what I'm trying to get Clary on. Maybe, yeah.

It's basically the balloon is bouncing along the ceiling. There isn't much more value to get here from at least the U.S. subscriber base. But maybe there is, though. This is what is annoying me about Netflix. Don't just make me, don't, like, slice and dice your tears. If you have 100 million people out there who aren't paying, but they use it all the time, charge them $6. Or offer a tier that's like just for the library.

like mostly all we watch on Netflix is like Office Re-Rer like 30 Rock reruns and Love is Blind. So just let me pay like $9 a month for. Yeah, there's a $9. That's possible. For an archive price. I don't know, but like innovate somehow. I'm just thinking of how to communicate it to users is possible.

I think the advertising thing is, you know, the most interesting possibility here because Disney is going to do that too. I think what people are realizing is there's a cohort of people who really want free and they're going to hold. hold out, I think you should hold the line. Netflix should hold the line and not do an advertising business. I think they should see if they can clean up these free subscribers and how many they get over because here's my fear.

They start going down that advertising path. They get kind of addicted to it. And then they just start inserting ads everywhere. And then people start downgrading their subscriptions to go to the advertising tier. And I just find it so annoying that I pay for no ads on Hulu and I still get ads or I pay for less ads or something. I don't know why I'm paying extra, but I still see ads. And I think HBO, Disney, Apple Plus, like, I think they figured it out.

Like, don't put ads in this and just let people pay for it because anybody can afford this. Yeah. And when it's the same price as one hour of labor and you're going to get 100 hours a month or 50 hours a month out of entertainment, that's a fine tradeoff. That's perhaps one of the best tradeoffs in the world. I think video games are the only tradeoff. in terms of costs per hour. Like, people will pay a video game,

like, what's this, Elder Scrolls or Eldon Rings or something that people are losing their minds over? They sold 12 million copies of. It's like one or one or the other or both of those, but yeah. Elton Ring. Elder. People are losing their mind over this game. Anyway, from what I understand, it's like,

it's like one of these like free world games where you can just go crazy for hours. So like people are playing it for five, ten hours a day. And whatever these things cost, if they cost 20 bucks a month or 60 bucks to buy the game on a console, like, you think about the number, of hours you're getting, it's a penny an hour, 10 cents an hour. And Netflix is one of those similar things. So, I think the bigger issue here is competition. I really do. Listen, lots of founders are Lucy Goosey with their personal phone numbers. They put them on company documents. They use them

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If it was the only game in town, no problem. But Disney is giving you everything. Everything I care about is on Disney Plus for $8 a month. That's bananas. People are going to spend, I believe, 50 to 100 bucks a month in this. And I'm talking every socioeconomic status. please don't at me like with, oh, poor people can't afford it. Well, sure, because they're paying that much for cable now.

So if they get rid of cable, then, yeah, that's where they end up. They're going to spend 50 to 100, everybody's going to spend 50 to 100 bucks of this. So when you're starting doing your math, if you're a price insensitive person, you just buy everything. So if you're in the $100 a month category, none of this matters. Like if you're a family and your lower middle class or above, 100 bucks a year for 100 bucks a month for this level of entertainment is absurdly a great deal. Compared to going to the movies, going out to dinner, going to a sporting event, cable, it's just obvious. You just buy everything and don't worry about it.

If you're middle class or above or even lower middle class above. And then for everybody else, you're going to have to pick and choose. Now, if you pick and choose, we've been through this before. If I give you the big four, Hulu, HBO Max, Disney Plus, and Netflix, you have to get rid of one. Who are you killing? If you're a family, you're killing Netflix, I think. I think you are.

I really think you are. And you're killing it at 20 bucks a month for sure. Well, isn't Hulu Disney Plus ESPN package like 20 bucks a month or 30 bucks a month? I have the package. I think so, but it's the package. And there's no,

and I keep saying 20 bucks a month because that's the premium that the high death. I don't even, I don't know what you get with basic at 10 bucks a month. Like, if I, let's go through your top five shows for the past year for you. Mm-hmm. All right.

Top five shows past year for you. that you really enjoyed, really, really couldn't wait for. Like had to sit down and watch, yeah. So we crashed and drop out, dope sick, euphoria, billions. Okay. I think those are mine. And we also do my wives, you know, the ones we love watching together because we're not a couple. You know, we watch everything together.

We don't go ahead of each other, Molly. I don't know what's going on in your relationship, but we try to be insane. I am stalling. I'm literally trying to figure out when to get that man over to watch severance because I don't want to ruin the relationship over the show. Exactly. It's serious business. I look at those five.

I just rattled them off. I don't know what channels are on, but I think, let's see. I know dope saying drop out were Hulu. Euphoria is HBO. Billions is Showtime, which I get through my Hulu bundle. And then what was the last one I said? I got to get up on this Hulu bundle. I don't think I know about this.

I'm just paying for everything individually like a dumb. I liked, I mean, succession. I got really excited about foundation and committed to watching all of it, even though like whatever, fine. We crashed in the dropout. That's one I can't watch because of relationship issues. My wife wants to watch it and I watch like the first episode and a half and, you know, it's like super dope.

But we just don't have enough time. We can't even keep up with the, oh, Succession, HBO is on that. Yeah, succession is HBO. There's, you know, there's the Mandalorian. There's Loki. There's all those good Disney Plus shows. I mean, if I think about, it's actually just a sheer accident that right now I've gotten into Love is Blind and that's all on Netflix.

And that's just trash. Like, I want to be clear, that's the Safeway part, right? That's just like, if I had to let that go, I would let that go. But I would not let go waiting for the next season of succession or the next beautiful Apple Tate. It means severance. I do think Netflix is not focused on making great content. Or weirdly technology. They're underestimating their audience and making milk toast, you know, Adam Sandler bullshit.

Like, I don't offense to Adam Sandler, but it's not for me. But then only charge. I mean, maybe my problem is that I pay for the top tier and the $999 would make me happy. And then I'd be like, sure, great. I'm paying for like happy content for $9.99. I don't know what I get for that. Inside analyst, friend of the pod, Lon Harris at Lons tweeted this. Disney Plus.

Hey, we made a TV show out of every movie you've ever watched. CBS. We've reunited the entire cast of every Star Trek. HBO. What if Game of Thrones but the Watchmen? Amazon. You guys like fantasy novels because we purchased all of them. Netflix.

Murder mystery. Adam Sandler. And Jennifer. I mean, come on. He tweeted this in July 2019 when Netflix was like ripping and he got a ton of flack for this. And then he quote tweeted it yesterday with, and you'll see these in the next couple tweets, basically telling everybody I told you so.

Yes. And so here's Lon's redunk on the dunk because this was a three-year-old tweet. Three years ago when I tweeted this, everyone said I was crazy to doubt Netflix. supremacy. They created the streaming market. Everyone has Netflix. It doesn't even matter if the shows and films are good, they said. But this is what happens. When you spend years shurning out tons of content, but it's all disposable

and designed to be devoured in a single sitting. He's absolutely correct. Such an interesting point, too, that came up on CNBC. The bingeability is almost its own trap. Because if you dole out content once a week, then people have to keep paying. But if you put something out all at once, and you can binge it, then one, they're done.

And two, it's a flywheel because you have to keep creating more content. Like if I make a cake for a teenager and he eats it all in one sitting, oh crap, I have to make more and more and more and more. And that's kind of what they did there too, which is really interesting. They thought it was to create stickiness, but actually it just put them in this like nightmarish sarlac pit of having to make more content every day. So to speak. Good both on the sarlack spit.

Thanks, thanks. That's on Disney Plus, by the way. When you think about why you love Netflix previously, it was like, oh, they did all the daredevil cool stuff. They did oranges, the new black house of cards, but was their big one, right? Oh, yeah, right. Yeah, I think so. They really backed interesting projects, right? Different projects, niche projects.

And now they're going for like Adam Sandler Goofy movies, no offense, if you like those, if that's your bag, it's all good. Comedy's going to be fun. It's not my bag, but it's all good. And then a bunch of reality TV stuff. Like, like, I'm going to say it, populist trash at premium prices. I'm not into that, right? And then, but then look what HBO did. Right.

Secession. Euphoria. Then you look at what Disney did. Boba Fett, Mandalorian, now Obi-Wan, like, Scarlet Witch and... Yeah, Loki, which is so risky and interesting. Like, really interesting avant-garde, I dare I say. Like, Marvel doing avant-garde stuff? interesting for adult adults and kids like really interesting um choices i think Netflix

programming sucks and i think that they're caught up in like a bunch of you know other culture war things that are nonsensical i mean i don't know if it's woke content i think that's like happening across the entire sphere but i do things like the chappelle thing showed a little bit of distraction of like oh my god like are we going to me are we comedy was their thing like And are they going to keep doing comedy? I thought that was their strongest piece. Would they ever do another Chappelle? Whatsoever that Netflix is going to stop doing comedy or even dump Chappelle, which they did not.

I don't even understand where you're getting this like woke distraction. I don't know if they give another $75 million to Chappelle. I don't know if they do it. Maybe they don't, but I don't think that's a, what? I think that Netflix has a woke distraction problem. I think there is like, I don't think their eyes on the ball of, and I think, there may be risk averse for doing like avant-garde, hardcore

stuff that maybe HBO Max would do, right? I think that, however, thanks to the notice for pointing out, they did Black Mirror and Squid Game. They bought Squid Game, right? They didn't, they didn't actually make it. They bought it. They bought that. But they did. They do get credit for Black Mirror.

What's going on with Black Mirror? What was the last Black Mirror series? Wasn't that like 10 years ago? So they acquired Black Mirror also. Yeah. Black Mirror is great. would they stop making it? I don't understand what happened to that anthology series. I mean, I think it's, if you want both, then you make populace trash, right?

Like, if growth is your goal, if you want a lot of people, you make populace trash. Like, there's not as big an audience for like really smart, high quality. There just isn't. And so if you're going to do that, it's a very specific strategy. And Netflix clearly said, like, we want everybody. So we're going to make content for everybody. but they missed in the quest for everybody the one thing that actually gets everybody

which is probably sports. Yeah. Sports, I don't know if they can actually do profitably because I think that Googles of the world and the apples of the world would take sports Oh, they can't. They missed it.

They missed it. Well, I think it's also a loss leader for those places. Probably. I think it's a loss leader for Apple. They want to sell more phones. You put Monday night football, Thursday night football, whatever. Yeah.

You know, if YouTube was going after it for a while and like YouTube would like, okay, if we lose a billion dollars on this, but we make 50 billion in advertising, okay. It's fine, right. It drew those final group of people who don't have the YouTube app onto the app.

Yeah. And you can see why they didn't do it because it's stupidly expensive and a loss leader, but now all those deals are made and they're like, oh, how do we keep growing? Efficiency is one of the main components in startup success. Everybody knows this, and that's what Coda is all about.

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explodey, pretty people movie or show is on TV. For years, my literal favorite show was the end of whatever action movie was on FX. Like, I get, I am all in on this. I'm all in on this. But if there's competition and the price keeps getting higher, that's a problem. I just think, like, Nick's pointing it out too, is this like HBO taking a lot of chances. Like, secession was like a big risk. I feel like Euphoria was a huge risk.

Like, these things were really out there. I may destroy you, which was a more niche content that didn't probably get as much attention as it should have, but I thought that was one of the most excellent, one of the most excellent things they've done in a long time. It's just so much more risk-taking there. And then even Apple in their corny kind of way, you know, with their milk to, well, with their like family fare kind of stuff.

Yeah. They kind of took a risk with Ted Lasso and with reprashed, and they hit both of those out of the park. Yeah. So I just think Netflix is not competing. Severance. We're not competing for great content. That morning show show was actually really good on Apple TV.

Yeah. And foundation. Jennifer Aniston in that? you know, I was prepared to hate it. And she can't take her. Is fantastic because she's basically just doing, well, it's like if they turned her into herself as a morning show personality. And so it totally works because you're like, yeah, it doesn't matter that you're not acting.

And it doesn't matter that your face is weird and kind of can't move very well because that's like the whole point. You're a morning show personality and totally works. I'm with Gerald, one of the Nodies who's like, Netflix, if they just cut the crap, focus dollars on big stuff and switch to weekly releases available. We're binging later. That's a tough pill to swallow, but it gets them a lot of the way. There's too much content.

There's one show that I was really obsessed with, because it was Ozark. Ozark is a great show on Netflix. I heard that's great. It's so dark. Well, I like Jason Bateman. He's an incredible actress. The woman is a, oh, Laura Linney. I always get her mixed up.

Oh, yeah, I love her. Laura Linney. She's great. And then Ruth, Julie Gardner is incredible. I mean, the performances are just next level. in that show. And I like Jason Bateman. There's good stuff.

There's just too much stuff, right? Like competition came and Netflix didn't. Netflix, I think, I think, doubled down on the exact wrong strategies to try to build a moat, which is more and more content, black hole, right? Black hole of spending and growth, even when that growth was free. And I would have loved to see them instead, like, they sort of barely have that, like, the watch together. Like, I would have loved to see them roll out features that make it easier to use and the streaming

experience better and like watch together and maybe one person rents a movie and maybe tears where you just subscribe to movies or you just subscribe to the library. Like there was so much that could have happened in the last decade and it just let everybody come in and eat their lunch. Here's the thing. Once they figured out that like action movies and rom-coms became like a draw, like the algorithm figured that out. Yeah. Then remember they did like a Will Smith action film. It was like completely Gemini Man. I don't know what it was. They did like two or three action films back to back. I was like, wow, these are good trailers, and these are terrible films. And then the movies are not. And I have the lowest bar ever for stupid action movies. And even

I was like, I'm like that for sci-fi. And they did a couple of Ryan Reynolds ones. And then they did the same thing with rom-coms where they're just like, we're going to do every rom-com possible. And I'm like, you know what? I need you to just maybe a little more polish. Yeah. Maybe a little bit of a unique spin. Bring it up a little. Just level it up. I'm dying for a great rom-com. Anybody got to go prom-com for me? I'm just going to go back and watch Notting Hill again. I know. I'm dying for a kick-ass action movie.

Like, give me... Where is Jack Ryan, too? That was a great action movie. Moon night is fantastic. Moon Knight. So I'm getting all my action picks on Disney. Here's the thing with Marvel and Disney. Like, you think they're going to make the same cookie cutter Marvel stuff,

because the movies kind of did get predictable. Like, are we going to laugh? We're going to have quips. We're going to have a big battle sequence. It's never going to end. It's going to move quickly. We're going to introduce new characters. fan service, the end.

Two more fan services. Really, this is the end. It was like a really tight formula. And then they do the TV shows and they're like, yeah, Moonnights got this weird director and this thing's going to meander and be a lot of dialogue. And I was like, my daughter's going to hate this. They love it.

Yeah. They love it. There's like one fight scene for 30 seconds every film. And it's like, wow, what a great development they did there. And then the same thing with the Scarlet Witch one, because they're like, yeah, we're going to have this concept of like TV shows through the era. And again, I thought. my daughter's going to hate this.

There's no action. It's like very intellectual and ephemeral. What's going on here? And they loved it. So there's something they're doing. The same thing happened with Boba Fett, Mandelorian. It was like,

okay, are these going to be interesting? Yep. They're super interesting and different. It's really interesting watching all the, it's really interesting watching all the shows pop up to, from the NOTES, like they canceled altered carbon, which was a really interesting,

risky premise, super cool action show. like it is they really something about their algorithm seems to have told them to just like keep playing it safe with stupid stuff and then to the sudden you have no black mirror and you have no altered carbon and you're losing these kind of risky cool shows and at some point like everybody OD's on candy let otors otore like let some artists make weird cool yeah that's the best advice for netflix let people make weird weird stuff and then see what breaks out. You got to take some more chances here. And, you know, HBO takes, has incredible taste. When I see the HBO logo or when they play that little Tiffany like HBO thing, you know what I think? The shit's going to be well crafted.

And then when I see the Netflix thing come up, I'm like, this is probably going to be bad, isn't it? I'm like, this is how I'm going to kill 45 minutes. I train me. Netflix is like, I need to kill 45 minutes before I go to bed because I've tapped out on energy and time. right? Like I can't do any more emails and I'm super poopered and I'm just going to see if there's anything good on Netflix and it's probably going to be the great bridge breaking show. Rather listen to a podcast. Rather listen to a podcast. Yeah, or read a book. Yeah. This is the thing about like, do you remember the original HBO logo, HBO Tiffany kind of Tiffany like when they. Da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. Oh my God. And you'd fly through the town into like down the chimney into somebody's TV. Like so good. It just made you feel like, okay, something good. good's coming here.

And I feel that same way with the Showtime logo now. The Showtime logo comes up. I'm like, oh, billions. Like, it's going to be good. Oh, a homeland. So I think like your brand has to stand for something.

The HBO brand, the Showtime brand. Man, those just get me pumped for whatever's coming next. Yeah. Netflix brands. Netflix stands for time wasting. It's going to be a gobble, gobble, go get a gobble,

Adam Schender. It's like, I'll just wait. I'll just wait while you want to do more of that because that's amazing. No, I don't have an Adam Sandler. I've never, I've never completed an Adam Sandler film.

Oh my God. I don't have anything against Adam Sandler. He's a cool guy. You are such a liar. You've never finished Happy Gilmore or Billy Madison? No. Well, specifically those.

Actually, the one I love is the one, everybody, every Adam Sandler film, funny people is my favorite Adam Sandler. Incredible. I do want to see on cock down. I felt like that was Hartfeld, and that was him doing like,

Bill Murray. Fifty first dates. There's some great Adam Sandler. Like, I'm not, this is not a bash on. Was he in forgetting Sarah Marshall? No, that's Jason. No, that's Jason. No, that's Jason.

Seagall. Seagall. That one I love. Are you for scuba? Are you for scuba? This is terrible. Listen, when you start scaling quickly, your company needs to be run professionally. And O-Doo is the software that helps you maintain control of your fast-running business.

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Well, okay, while we have you in the mood to do impressions. Oh, okay, here we go. I don't have a Jared Kushner impression dialed in, but I'm going to just make it like a nerdy. Just like the crappy pit. Yeah, I love this. Okay. So. And the most exciting news to come along and just for sheer schadenfreude,

Jared Kushner's $3 billion VC pitch deck, the deck that he used to raise $3 billion from the Saudis after he sold them. You got two from them. Two from them. I think you raised $3 billion overall. So it was leaked by the Intercept and it is exactly what you might expect. For a little background here last summer, former President Trump's former top aide and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, of course, formed this global investment firm called Affinity Partners. It raised more than $3 billion in funding from LPs. It targeted large American and foreign LPs.

It sounded like mostly where most of the money came from last week, the New York Times reported that six months after Kushner left. left the White House, Affinity closed a $2 billion investment commitment from the Saudi Crown Prince, despite objections from the funds advisors who were like, hmm, this guy seems like a dumb dumb. I might be paraphrasing, but that's basically what they said. So let's just, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do a cold. I've skim the deck, but I'm going to do this cold.

I'm going to pitch affinity partners. Oh, my God. Okay. I'm going to be, I'm going to play LP way. I have my Amber mug. from the sovereign wealth fund of the kingdom, Saudi Arabia. I don't know about that. Let's ever be LP from Yale endowment.

LP from Yale endowment. Perfect. Wait, I'm switching out. I'm switching to my smart person specs. I got a lot of specs in here. Okay. Members of the Yale endowment, thank you for taking the time today, especially chairperson of the board, Ms. Mollywood.

We appreciate your time. and I'm super excited to share with you the opportunity to join affinity partners. Now, if you're asking what we're going to do, we're accelerating transformation through connectivity. And let's look at each of these words, accelerating. We want to go fast. We want the future to arrive quicker. And we can only accelerate that as if we transform everything. and how will we transform everything?

Well, we're going to network it together through connectivity because this accelerated transformation can only happen if everybody participates it and we want to bring everybody along. So here is your opportunity. Affinity invest in opportunities where we can add value. That's right. We are not going to invest unless we can add strategic enablement. Now, you're asking, these two words sound terrible together.

This makes no logical sense. What is strategic enabling? Well, we're going to enable people to think strategically, because most people who are building businesses are not strategic thinkers. I guess. Here on the left, you see in this incredible fan fold, and we do think about the fan, because we want to blow smoke and oxygen and build this fire even hotter. We do not want to invest in the early to mid-state venture space where all the opportunity

is. And no, we don't want to do buyouts. No, we want to exist between the early and the late stage. That's why you see our logo there doing strategic enablement. I'd like to, if I may, interject for just a moment. You can hold your questions to the end or you can ask me now. Yes, we'll take questions. Just a quick one before we move on.

Is that a real word? Well, you know, we would like to creatively create a new vernacular that we can all agree on to really take advantage of this unique opportunity in the world. And strategic enablement, we think, summarizes it best. Most people are incapable of thinking strategically, but through the Accords and the Peace in the Middle East, which I created, along with the Saudis, you saw that strategic enablement in work,

you know, just really at work. So our unique experience and perspective allows us to tie macro and government policy trends to economic themes and investment opportunities. We know the big picture

and how that will trickle down into economic themes and investment opportunities. This is an easy I'm having a hard time sling this bull. Holy crap. Okay, we approach opportunities creatively

based on the concept that aligned economic interests can solve intractable problems and create previously unrealized value. Yes, that is a full sentence that some human being wrote. Okay, we approach opportunities creatively so we do not come at them

with, you know, a boring playbook. We do it creatively. No cookie. cutter crap here. No. We're not, we're not, we're not drawn inside the lines here. But we look at these opportunities, Molly, you understand. And certainly Yale can understand this. We are going to creatively approach these opportunities on the concept, is this even good English, that aligned economic interests. In other words, everybody's thinking with their pocketbooks, if everybody is creatively thinking about their own self-interest,

if I can translate what I wrote, we will solve intractable problems. These are the problems that nobody can solve. Global warming. So if you primarily think about your self-interest, you'll definitely work together better. Yes.

If you're thinking only about your economic interest, you'll solve the problems that nobody else can solve. And this will create previously unrealized value because unrealized value, by definition, is previously unrealized, it's kind of implied, but we wanted to put more words in here and make the sentence even harder to understand and copy.

You know what people love in slides, lots of words. We wanted to go for a long sentence. That was impossible to follow. And that, we think, is the best undecipherable statement in the deck, actually. So you can just put a little, yeah, put a little posted on it. But let's see if we can. one up it. We integrate our geopolitical experience.

I worked for my father-in-law. Global connectivity, which is kind of like I can send an email to anybody, and then it could be subpoenaed by the government. And problem-solving approach with rigorous private equity growth investing, driven by an experienced team and analytical research process. I don't even know what I read. Like literally four words later,

I still don't know where I started. Hold on. Let's try one more time. I just keep putting up the red flag because I just can't put it away. It's just crazy. Try that again. Wait.

Try that again. I'm sure we can get this. We can get this. This is the worst written sentence, actually. The previous one is terrible. This is worse because this one wraps four times. We integrate our geopolitical experience. Okay.

Integrate our, okay. We're experienced. We're worldly. Just to take those four words. words, we're worldly. We have traveled a lot. The world is, yes, we've been around the world. And met a lot of politicians.

Yes, we've been around the world. And the world is connected. And we have a problem solving approach with rigorous private equity growth investing. And problem solving rigorous private equity growth investing driven. That makes no sense. The sentence is not proper English. Wait, I think I got it. I think I got it.

I think I got it. Problem-solving approach with rigorous private equity growth investing driven by an experience team and analytical research process. Yeah. That's part two of the sandwich here. So bread one is the geopolitical experience. So they're like, A, we have geopolitical experience, global connectivity and a problem-solving approach. And then when we combine that with rigorous private equity growth investing driven by an experienced team and analytical research process, then boom! Can I interest you in a period?

Like, this could be two sentences. Or a comma. Or a comma, or maybe just take out the word global connectivity, because what is that serving there? What does that even mean? And also, like, we have an email account and sometimes, and what is problem solving approach? Like, you need an adjective there. A good problem solving approach? Innovative?

Like, unique? I tried and true. We just have one. A battle test it? Okay. I just have one. Anyway, let's put up a slide. Let's continue.

This slide is value add partnership. Not value-added. It's just value-ad partnership. We consider this between who? Affinity's unique network and experience makes us a differentiated partner for companies navigating the rapidly evolving global political and economic environment, drawing on operation geopolitical experience of the unique affinity network, driving international expansion and accessing new markets, navigating critical government challenges and opportunities. we pay people off, offering any problem-solving experiences,

like smoothing over a coup inside of the kingdom and getting you out from under that bone saw murder of a journalist. All of these value ads are possible in our partnership. This is another terrible slide. This makes no sense. We identify transformation opportunities in technology, media, telecom, healthcare, blah, blah, all the ones. Affinity partners focus on five key verticals.

Ooh. Specifics. Wait. I'm sure we're going to get specifics here, right? Five key verticals? Yes. Secular winners. Okay.

I'm trying to find in high growth companies in scalable markets. Okay. So you want high growth, you want companies that are growing in big markets. Got it. If I may interject here from my position as Yale investor. Ms. Wood from Yale. I've noticed that as your five key verticals,

you've identified technology, media, and telecom, healthcare, financial services, and institutions. consumer services, and sustainable energy and growth infrastructure, aka every industry in the world. Yes. We're focusing on these five, which encompass all categories, yes. All.

But we're narrowly focused on these five, which define all opportunities globally in the history of humanity. We left out tulips. But we are focused. We're focused on five. Actually, to be fair, there's no crypto on here. So in fair enough, but we put that under financial services.

If you double click on the slide, I'll see. Hold on. Oh, my God. And here is your flywheel. And here's page eight, slide eight. This is where we have our obligatory flywheel. Technology innovation leads to rising expectations, which leads to leapfrogging progress. Leaprogging progress.

Wait, you're going to jump over progress? We're going to leapfrogging now. I mean, this is a stupid shit I've ever read. I mean, I can't happen. I'm a writer, and I'm so insulted by the words on this page. Who wrote this? This is literally written by some person whose parents photoshopped that. I guarantee you this is written by somebody whose parents photoshopped them into a cross-photo

in order to get them into an Ivy League school. This person is the worst writer on the planet. Let me try this. This is, wow. All over the world. accelerating innovation breakthroughs accelerating innovation breakthroughs so we're describing breakthroughs

okay the breakthroughs that themselves are right throughs that are innovation based and that are accelerating okay are causing massive changes to the way we live no example given why with the passive voice why with the passive voice our understanding of the nexus of industry and country trends provides differentiated insights wait a second we need a drinks for this

our understanding of the nexus of industry and country trends provides differentiated insights. Wait, is that a proper sentence? Is that grammar? I just want to go back and say that this raised $3 billion. I mean, not this, really. It's the selling of the classified secrets and it's the active of there was a $2 billion payoff in exchange for getting them off the hook for the Khashoggi murder and also evidently some really classified information. I mean, somebody who investigate this.

I mean, literally, I mean, I mean, why are everybody's kids? Why are the kids of everybody in grifters and the son-in-laws? This is just grift-central. Nick says we have to cruise to the diligence slide because that sounds amazing. I'm just going to read this on. Amazing. Every traditional industry will be transformed by new technologies in the next wave of the industrial revolution.

This statement was incredibly valid in 1992. Our approach. Oh my God. This isn't even a funnel chart. What is this flowchron? Whoa. We have transformational opportunities in every sector on the planet. Affinity carries out a thorough and in-depth assessment of potential investments and examines a range of quantitative and qualitative factor.

This is it. Literally, as if someone asked them, just write that you do diligence in the most convoluted and hard to understand way possible. Okay. Sourcing and screening of investment opportunities results. weekly investment discussions. They have a weekly meeting. Every week and they put that in the slide? Yes.

And then resources are allocated based on that. For liminary investment review, PIR, that's peer. PIR. We do our peer and investment memorandum. If you give it an memorandum, it'll sound like a real thing. Then the investment committee gets the investment memorandum in the peer and then it goes back and forth. I wish that everyone listening to this would be watching. the video because you've got to see the

a fucking arrows on this slide. It's just so dumb. Like some arrows go down and then some are like, but the preliminary investment review, we have an email. Oh my God, they have an orchart too. And the investment memorandum,

which is a deal memo. And then the committee, what they do is they email each other and then they write a memo and decide. I mean, you put this in a slide? I mean, this here's how an investment decision works. Work at a job.

Affinity carries out a thorough and in-depth assessment of potential investment. and examines a range of quantitative and qualitative factors. Well, there's a decision-making process. Here are a bunch of disturbing sociopathic-looking individuals on slide 15. This should appeal to any dictatorship. These men will do whatever it takes to win and have not been convicted of any felonies.

Yeah. Here's a general who is 20 years older than that photo and has no idea what we do, but we gave him $75,000 a year to put him in the deck. Here's one woman who works on our team in operations. She's our CFO. She's super annoying, but we needed a woman in the company, so we added her.

You don't know she's annoying. Oh, there is. I'm saying this is Jared Kushner's representation. Yeah, he's like, here's my 12-person team. Here's my totalian workwoman. But I do. Yeah. We, none of us like her.

But, you know, she's our mom. And then Jared gets his own slide. And then here I am. I have no discernible intelligence and or ability except being born into the Lucky Sperm Club. My dad made money in real estate. And I married another guy.

Before he went to, Jay. The wife's dad made money in real estate, and they both committed a lot of crimes. It seems. The end. All right. Here's some disclosures. I am a complete dip. But I did smooth over the Khashoggi killing, and I got you a billion dollars worth of armaments, and I made you a partner to the United States.

And the end. You owe me two billion. Let's see if they can figure out a way to stop us. So, on this. On this note, I feel that I now want to read word for word some of the concerns that the New York Times noted that the advisory panel from the Saudi Crown Prince Fund raised, quote, the inexperience of the affinity fund management. The possibility that the kingdom would end up responsible for, quote, the bulk of the investment and risk. Due diligence on the fledgling firm's operations found them, quote, unsatisfactory in all. aspects.

Which aspect? All? The all aspect? I think we covered that on slide 15. I call that the two red flagger, the double barrel. We found nothing. Yeah. Everything we looked at was concerning.

Was a disaster. It's like, can you imagine you go into a house and you're like, it's kind of a fixer-upper? And like, you're like, okay, what needs to be fixed up? You're like, well, the foundation and the plumbing. The electrical and the roof. and the mold and the windows and all the appliances

but other than that other than that's fine it's just like a light remodel they noted that the proposed asset management fee quote seems excessive and finally

that there might be a quote public relations risk from Mr. Kushner's prior role as a senior advisor to former Trump during which he completely botched for example America's pandemic response

leading to He's like, like a million. What is the price for you? What do I owe you for the Kosogi and the armaments? What is your commission again?

I'm sorry. My investment, yes. My payoff. My I owe you is what? What's my tab? How many bottles of? A word salad is not a fatal.

1.5. Rounded up to two. This sounds like you're, like your, you're Adam. It's a little bit. Yeah. I don't hate it.

I don't hate it. It's my generic Middle Eastern. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think that a word salad is necessarily disqualifying. Like our, you know, our producers are pointing out that this is sort of McKinsey. Speak like, I hate it, right? But apparently people raise money on this kind of crap all the time because McKinsey is still in business. But like, what do you do?

They do nothing. This is basically like, give us a couple of billion dollars so that we can just smooth over relationships, which, by the way, no, you can't because you're not. your dad is not your father-in-law is not an office. Like, I don't understand. Here's my new launch for a pitch deck. This inspired me to make it even more plain spoken. We invest early.

We build a large position. We sell after we return 50X and we start clearing that position. And we're trying to invest in many more early stage companies so that we can have many, many more large positions in those winners. The end. The end. we meet companies early and build a position in them over time. Yeah.

We try to be as supportive as possible and help them avoid mistakes. We believe in proper governance so we know, so we can protect LP's interests, and we know when a company is doing well so we can make them unsolicited offers to invest more money in their companies. The end. Oh, we have really smart people with proven track records. We have a track record. Here are their CVs. We have a track record.

We have a track record. We have a track record. We meet with 60 companies a week. We invest in the best one. Tada. Meet with 60, invest in the best one. It's not rocket science, folks. Literally, that's going to be my new pitch.

That's it. It's not rocket science, folks. Meet 3,000 qualified companies, invest in the top 50. I mean, you could even boil it down to. We invested in this many. companies and we made this much money. Yes. The end.

Catch and catch out. Right? I mean, it's really. This is our I'm allowed. Here's our. Drop the mic. Exactly. Here's the IonR.

Bless America. All right. Speaking about just absolute utter shit shows. And I'm reticent to dunk in this because people think I'm going to be just dunking on a certain individual. But media is my beat, obviously. And Axios has reported that CNN Plus, which you may or may not have heard. of, probably haven't, is in danger of being can just three weeks after launching.

Molly, bring us through the incredible Axios reporting here. Yeah, this is a phenomenal scoop by Axios. So the facts, as we know them, CNN Plus launched March 29th, just over three weeks ago, $300 million and then some $300 million plus has already been invested in hundreds of jobs. Thank you. To create the service, CNN Plus has about a hundred. 50,000 subscribers so far paying either $6 a month or $60 a year. It was actually fact check $3 a month if you signed up in the first month.

Oh, okay. So there's a lot of them we're probably only paying $3. However, at $6 a month per user, let's even say $3 million a month per year. At $6 million, that would be $10 million in yearly revenue. Sure. I'm going to go back to they spent $300 million. So that's not great. But, you know, I think you could safely file this maybe under slow start.

and you got to build to success. However, a couple things are going on all at the same time. CNN is under new management because Discovery CEO David Zazlob became the new CEO of the merged entity. It was under the Warner Media umbrella, which was owned by AT&T until about two weeks ago when this merger was finalized. So what they did is they started a big launch a long time ago, probably a year or more, maybe two or three years of a product. and then they have new management coming in. CNN also has this new incoming CEO, Chris Licht, who starts on May's first or second.

So it launched during this kind of turnover, executive turnover, and it's having a slow start. And now, according to Axios, Warner Brothers Discovery has suspended all external marketing spend for CNN Plus, has laid off CNN's longtime CFO, Brad Ferrer, and replaced him with Discoveries, CFO, Neil Chagani, not unheard of an merger. And Axios also reported that other high-level positions at WarnerMedia are likely to be eliminated to cut costs in streamlined leadership, all of which is leading to the potential conclusion that after three weeks and $300 million, CNN or Discovery, might be preparing to take Pluss out back and shoot it.

All right. Wow. Yeah. I gave my mini review. You know, I think it was like one of these situations. where they executed extremely poorly, but there might actually be just adjacent to what they did. I think with three iterations, two or three iterations, they could actually build a product that would be worth paying for. Now, let me explain what that is. I paid for the service. I checked it out.

I buy every service, some cover media. They did magazine style shows in the style of Anthony Bourdain, not realizing that in order to make a magazine-style show work, you kind of need somebody as the host who is so absurdly compelling that you cannot take your eyes off of them, and you can't stop listening to what they're saying. The magic of Anthony Bourdain was he was a writer. It was him, yeah.

But also he's a writer, and he wrote his own monologues. So when you consumed an Anthony Bourdain magazine-style show. You were listening to an essay with gorgeous visuals. Travel is one of the few places where a magazine-style show works. And if you look at the confluence of events that happen with Anthony Bourdain, he was a unique individual in all the world. So, personality. He was a gifted writer and actually put the work into

writing his monologues, which were so compelling. It's amazing. And then the one genre where you really can make this work is, I think, travel. It's incredibly visual. And you can pick a place and, you know, sometimes people will just look at their Apple screensaver and say, wow, look at the harbor of Hong Kong. It's gorgeous. So that combination of those three things, you put those three circles together, Anthony Burdane's in the middle. Now you try to recreate that.

And what do you wind up with? you know, like, they had... The Tucci show, which is nice, but not must see. None of them. Well, the Tucci, I think, you know, is trying to do something similar.

And he is, like, unique as a personality, but not a writer like Anthony Bourdain. So it's missing that piece for me. But it is beautiful. And the, the Tucci show is actually not Anthony Bordane, but it's, it's almost there. Yeah. Now, they then did Prof.

Profji in that format. The guy on, who I like, who does state of Jake Tapper, Jake Tapper, who I like a lot. He's an interesting personality. They did him on a book club. And then they did Anderson Cooper doing parenting. Now, I watched all three of those shows from start to end.

None of them were good. Okay, why aren't they good? They felt like they were not written by the host. The hosts were not super compelling. Jake Taper was the most compelling, if I'm being honest. But then they kind of milk toasted it because it was like 20. minutes or whatever, like very short. And I just thought podcasting is much better than all of this.

Jake Tapper's book club had some potential. And so I think over time, if they kind of let it run, it could work. But anyway, I think those magazine style shows were the worst of what they did. Yeah. And they were lazily put together. There wasn't like a soul to any of them. With the exception of everything, Jake, and maybe a little bit Anderson. Putting those aside, they just weren't well executed.

They did do live news like we're doing right now with the noties and comments, but they didn't let raw comments through. You had to put a question in, and then they would anoint the question. So what happens? There's no risk. There's no energy. And those shows were kind of interesting,

even without that, because you're like, okay, it's people at a desk responding to questions, and they were doing the smack by Will Smith. So, you know, obviously it was like an interesting topic that was right of the moment. But then the guy who left Fox News, who I like Chris Wallace,

he was not putting his live show in front of that format. So they just had him on like he was normally on CNN or Fox with no questions being allowed. So they should have done. Here's CNN. You don't get CNN with CNN Plus, which is the most confusing thing ever. That would be like buying HBO Max and not getting Sopranos. It would be like buying Disney Plus and not getting. Mickey Mouse, like,

talk about it, like, an idiotic expectation. So there's not even like a bundle? It should have just included CNN. It should have included CNN. Without ads. So when they went to ads, they should have just shown you the studio, like a white shot, which is what you get on NBA League passes. It's really interesting. Like, we'll show you the arena.

They should have just shown Anderson Cooper moving his papers, getting his makeup, touched up. Would be dope. Yeah. To have CNN on and see the thing in the background and see him getting prepared for that show. Of course, the talent maybe wouldn't do that. my idea was you take the you know have like an anchor desk that does in between commentary when the anchors on CNN go to commercial so imagine if you and I went to

instead of if you and I took a break here on this live thing and Rachel and Justin came up as producers and just talked about the next segment and queued it up and talked about the previous segment the audience would be like oh wow it's kind of behind the scenesy you know actually Leo Lipport used to do this on twit he would show you the studio live and he would would be live the whole time. I mean, sometimes people would clip him having conversations for yelling at somebody and be like, oh, he's chewing somebody out for. But anyway, it's a complete disaster. It's not worth paying for. Whoever came up with a creative idea should be fired. But there is something about a news network without advertising that would be super

compelling. I agree with you. And I think that it would be a mistake to take it out back and shoot it now because I think there is really a way to, you know, there's been. a lot made of the fact that Chris Licht wants to come in. And he did this actually with the CBS early show, which is now called CBS this morning, I think, took it from Fluffy Bunny magazine show to a news show, like really put a lot more news on there. And he wants to do the same thing with CNN, like get rid of some of this like super analysis, evening programming, Cuomo and all that. And make it, because what used to happen, you kids will not remember this, but there was a

time in our world when news would break and you would turn on CNN because you'd be like, oh my God, I need to know what's happening. The news. Right. I don't want to know what people are thinking about the news. I want to know the news. And that completely stopped at CNN. They leaned into personalities and analysis and then, you know, Trump came and it was like, oh, that's all we'll just that's all we'll talk about. I would love an option where CNN is the news and CNN plus is the analysis. Like take that and then put your magazine shows there, sure, but also have your roundtables, like bring all in, like buy all in, not buy it, whatever, right?

But some version of a show that is really like, if I want to, because what I feel in the news landscape right now is that all, I don't know anything. I just know what people think about things. So give me a channel where I can find out what's happening. And then let me have an add on. When we queue up the facts, like we go through the facts here on the show and we give you the facts. and then we'll do a little analysis, but they're just doing all analysis and opinion,

and it's... I think there still is a chance, right? There still is a chance to merge these two products to make CNN more newsy and then have PlusB analysis, roundtables, magazines. It's a great idea. Great idea. That would be a great way if you could just flip the channel

back and forth, back and forth. Okay, I just want to go straight news. So whatever's in the news, just like the BBC does on their channel or CNBC is doing like a more... news desky feel, where you're just rolling through segments, boom, boom, boom, boom, 10 minute segment, five minute segment, get me caught up.

So anyway, I think they have to iterate twice on it. I think just kill all these magazine shows and start over. Yeah. But they're probably just going to kill it because they're so weird right now. It's like such a weird management disaster. Yeah. I mean, I guess these are good businesses. They get to like a million or two million people watching them at night.

But, you know, it's kind of laughable that, Joe Rogan gets 10 million people listening to an episode. You know, Ben Shapiro or The New York Times Daily probably gets to like low millions. Like they actually get more listeners than CNN and they're spending all this money. I mean, for $300 million, they could have come and bought 30 of the top podcasts in the world for $10 million, right? I mean, think what you and I could have done with $300 million to build a content empire? Forget it. Ridiculous.

Ridiculous. And how much of that actually? wound up on the screen, I have no idea. But, you know, we, you know, like, as a, but an example, like, this show probably gets similar, you know, ratings to CNBC and all in goes way past it, right? And so, you know, the podcasting area is much more interesting. And I think you, if they had made CNN Plus in an era before podcasting, you might be like, oh, wow, I can get a little deeper into tech.

I can get a little deeper into books. scratch this itch, you know, of, you know, 30 minutes on one topic, food, whatever, parenting. But now it's like, if you type in parenting, there must be 50 incredible parenting, you know, companies. And like, let's face it, face it, CNN could have bought, could have done what Spotify did. They bought Gimlet for a couple hundred million and they bought the ringer. CNN could have bought the ringer or Gimlet and had a much better content strategy than what they made at home, which means the people who work at CNN are not. not good at making shows.

Yeah. Full stop. They are not good at making shows. And you can see, I know everybody, I know listeners that our content roots are showing here because we can't let go of this because it's such a miss that it's just like I will obsess upon this forever. The only thing I've obsessed about more today is the leadership change at the New York Times, but that's different.

What? There's a leadership change at the New York Times? Yeah, yeah. They're getting a new, Bacay is retiring and they're getting a new executive editor. And the New York Times has declared that everything is fine at the New York Times. It's perfect. So we're just basically putting in the ultimate like long time insider who won't change a thing. I just bought 9.1%.

Great plan, guys. Great plan. I just bought 9.1% of the non-voting shares. All right. Exactly. CNN. I'm doing a futile takeover. The other thing that's crazy about CNN is that clearly by developing clues instead of buying the ringer,

instead of bringing in new exciting talent, instead of like seeding new ground, they were like, everyone loves our stars so much. They don't. They don't. Everyone loves our stars so much. But they'll watch Jake Tapper, who's a hardcore political commentator at this point, right? He's the opinion slinger. I don't give a shit about his book club.

Anderson Cooper is a wartime reporter. I don't want to know. I'm not interested in this parenting. What the hell? This was another, like, mistake. They should have looked, I mean, here's a, there's so many strategies that would have worked better that you just have to think that there's just utter complete incompetence at CNN in terms of making shows. and then anybody who's working there

must be there just for the paycheck and to not work because there was so little craftsmanship put into this stuff that, or thought, you could have just went to the podcasting ranks and found five podcasts and just licensed the frick out of them.

Seriously. For less money. I mean, they only made like six or seven new shows, I think. And if you just had to get seven shows, well, then just go straight down the line, pick one in the best one in each category and buy a license to the, and put them there.

Yeah. And the, when you look at making a show like these magazine shows, you're talking about, you know, it's a running gun shoot. So you probably have, I would say,

between six and 12 staff, you know, like doing this running gun type of production on the street. Maybe with Anderson Cooper, it's more, maybe he demands more,

but you can do running gun style magazine shows with a tight group, six people, 12 people. Yeah. Of those six to 12 people, I would say, let's just say it's 10 people. I did one.

I did one with five. You did one with five. It was a half hour always on. It was a half hour magazine style show, broadcast quality show. We were a five person crew. Right. So somebody like CNN's going to double that, right? Because they're just going to be more resource,

precious, precious. Yeah. They just, we do it the right way. So anyway, let's say they have 10 people. Yep. Of those 10, how many are doing the content, the words, the moments, two, one or two. How many are doing the sound?

Two or three, how many doing the video? Four or five. So you have eight people doing the sound and audio and capturing it, and you have one or two people making it, plus the host. You arguably have like two or three people, and then when you have podcasting, it's the opposite. You have like one person recording it on Zoom or whatever, doing the audio and the editing,

and then you have four or five people doing the content. That's the right ratio. More of the dollar, Molly, has to go into the, content in order to compete against, you know, someone like Bill Simmons or us or whoever, you have to put more money into the production of the words, the actual opinions, the content. That's where the magic happens. And they're doing like, you know, flyby shots and drone shots and lighting. You know, oh, that's the other thing.

Lighting, you know, oh, my God, you got two lighting people and so much equipment. Oh, yeah. And they're holding the thing up. I'm working with $30 in lights here, I think. Well, that's not true. $130. I just want to shout out Jay and the Noda gang for this lovely compliment and I think it's freaking true.

Given how well twist is run, I imagine it would take out Bloomberg with a $300 million budget. Well, let's get there. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. We got a Rachel reporting and training where we're building up our bench. Look how fast the producers pulled that comment up.

Like I scrolled way down for that. Boom. That's what I'm talking about. Okay. Let's talk about Just Eat takeaway, announcing they're looking to sell Grubhubhub. Wait, what? Yeah, speaking of headwinds, friends. This makes no sense.

Okay, well, to the, wait, because wasn't Uber trying to buy Grubhub at some point? This was like in play, and then they went with Just Eat Takeaway. What happened? Yeah. So, yeah, Just Eat Takeaway finalized a $7.3 billion acquisition of Grubhub. Just 10 months ago, Just Eat Takeaway is that Netherlands-based food delivery company that agreed to acquire Grubhubhub into 2020, took a full year. year for the deal to be realized. Everything was looking great for food delivery during that year. The deal was an all-stock transaction over the last year. Just Eat peaked at about $20 billion market

cap, now trading at $6.5 billion roughly. And then earlier Wednesday, Just Eat sent this note, quote, the management board confirms its alignment with shareholders in wanting to both create and realize value from the company's highly attractive portfolio of assets. As such, management is currently, together with its advisors, actively exploring the introduction of a strategic partner into and or the partial or full sale of Grubhub. Interesting. There can be no certainty that any such strategic actions will be agreed

or what the timing of such agreements will be for their announcements will be made as and when appropriate. Bwam. So, I think I translate that as we've made a terrible mistake. Or, Uber was trying to buy it, I believe, and I think DoorDash was considering it. And perhaps they're looking at this situation saying, we bought this for $7 billion. When our stock was, and it was an all-stock deal, our stock is worth what now?

What's the total market cap of the two companies? I guess the question would be. And then do they think by selling this to Uber or DoorDash or Lyft or somebody else who wants to be in the space, would that create more? value. So now, currently they're trading at about a $6.5 billion market cap and this deal has, that's the total for Just Eat, which has finalized this agreement. So yeah, combined, six and a half billion dollars. So that would be combined.

So they had a 20 billion market cap. Now they're down to $6.5 billion. They bought it for $7 billion. So the combined entity is worth more than the value of the purchase. But they purchased it when they had a $20 billion market cap. So they probably gave up a third of their company for it. If they did all stock, right? 7 billion would be a third of 21 billion or something like that.

Yeah. So now they're probably thinking, our stock is undervalued at 6.5 billion. Could we sell this for what we paid for it, 7 billion, and then double our value? Or could we sell it for 4 billion? And then our market cap goes down to 4 billion or 5 billion, and then we have 4 billion in cash. Anyway, I thought it was bizarre that Uber Eats or Dorets. DASH didn't get this or somebody else. They also announced in the update,

year-over-year numbers for just-eats Q1 order growth and gross transaction volume were super disappointing. Total orders decreased 1% year-over-year from 2021 to 2022, from $267 million to $264. So when your business gets flat, man, that is the kiss of death in the public markets, private markets.

I just had this conversation with the founder. I was on a board call the other day and I was like, listen, if we're flat, how do we expect to raise money? Like there's other businesses that are growing. We have to get this growth turned around. You can't be flat and expect people to invest. That's just, yeah, that's just gnarly.

I mean, I think we have to ask this question. I have two questions about this. One, did everybody literally think the pandemic was not going to end? Because the short term thinking in terms of making a $7.5 billion acquisition based on pandemic purchase trends. Yes. raises questions to me. But also...

So in that one, what I would say is they did... They had experienced a massive uptick in their value and they did an all-stock transaction. So it wasn't like they paid cash, right? They didn't pay cash. So that's smart. But at the same time, they did an acquisition based on growing this particular business, food delivery,

which has been a kiss-of-death business for decades. Like you and I have lived through... It's a low-margin business. that you need scale and operational efficiency Are we about to discover that I mean I really sincerely believe the landscape has changed based on just how much

I use food delivery but I also are we about to learn this lesson all over again that like ride hailing and food delivery that these are businesses that just don't work at scale no they work at scale they don't work

without scale with an asset heavy infrastructure. So the problem is if you pay for the cars, which is what, you know, like Webvan did, they own the vans. You know, I think when it's asset heavy, it's very problematic because you have just too much infrastructure cost. And without scale, you know, if you're making two or three dollars per delivery, like, well, who cares if you're doing a million deliveries? But if you're doing a billion deliveries and it's global, well, yeah, that's going to be pretty great. And if people are buying and riding in your app.

So I think being either or is challenging, but being both is kind of the big win. So I think that's why Uber is probably cementing its position. Like you have to have something else. You can't just be food delivery. You can be food delivery and ride-haling. Or maybe Just Eats was thinking you can do this at mega scale. You can do it if you have enough volume to make up for any margin weakness. I mean, DoorDash and Uber Eats are both crushing.

it and they're both, you know, increasing prices. And Uber and Lyft have been increasing prices to get to profitability. So profitability is just starting to happen with those businesses because they are not being subsidized by investors anymore. So I think they'll both be highly profitable businesses, DoorDash and Uber. But I do think if you're just one, it's a little bit harder because you have to, every time you acquire a driver, every time Uber acquires a driver, they acquire. require them for two potential missions, food or people.

And if Lyft, it's one mission and with DoorDash, it's one mission. So you just don't have the same operational efficiencies. This is why I think Uber's going for the super app as well. If they can get you to buy your ferry ticket as well, your hotel, you know, get a restaurant reservation, all of that's going to be the super app. And Uber is going to mean booking something. It's not that, you know, Uber will mean booking something, you know. Getting something done is what Uber will ultimately mean.

So I'm still long on it. I do think these businesses are hard to do. And that's the defensibility of them, right? Because if you do figure out, it's hard. But it has to be asset light. That's the major issue. Once you start, you know, and you have to charge the right fees. If people complain that it costs $40 to have their food delivered or $30 to have their food delivered and they want it to cost 10, well, there's not enough.

in the United States, in a major city, $10 isn't going to get it done. It's just not going to get it done. The person who's delivering the food needs to $10. And the company's got to make $10. So there needs to really be $20 in fees and profit on top of you picking it up. Yeah. And to be more, to our point way, way back at the beginning of the show,

everything has to be a little more expensive. Well, I mean, and then you can't sit here and complain like, oh, we want no immigration and we don't want any, you know, people who are starting on the first rung of their career. Well, if you don't want immigration and you want people who are high school educated or perhaps even college educated to deliver your food, you're not going to be able to pay the minimum wage. You're going to have to pay the minimum wage plus, plus, plus. Yeah. And if we want to have unions and we want to have a standard of living and we want people to have health care, well, okay, you're not going to get your DoorDash or your Lyft or your

Uber ride for the same cheap price you got it. So as a society, we're making a decision to to bake in a lot of costs. And it's probably the right move, actually, that things are more expensive. I mean, that consumption goes down a little bit. Exactly. The article about the death of the subsidized millennial lifestyle. Yeah. It's more true every day.

Like, it was never sustainable. Free delivery and super cheap Uber rides. Like those... $5 fast sweatshirts. Yeah. Hoodies. Sorry. Oh, God.

Sorry, millennials. No more $5. For you. No more hoodies for you. Dom. I love you, Don. I love you, Dom. Shout out to Dom.

Somebody, somebody texts me. I don't know who Nick loves more, Dom or Adam Newman. It's like, it's a tough one. My two favorite, my two guys.

I love one. Two, homies. Oh my God. That would be great. If we had the failure panel at All In Summit, it would be great.

It would be amazing. Disacting failure would be an amazing. Failure is a good thing in our business, I thought. So they should be totally game for it. I can get you. The guy did build a massive business. Dude,

he secured the bag. He got $1.7 billion on the way out by euro. Awesome, awesome product. I can't say awesome business because they were losing. We love Adam Newman. Awesome. We work as a great product. I will stand by that.

Perfect product. I stand by. We work as the perfect product. I understand. And Molly also had a hilarious comment. We, we grow. We grew. He did a couple months ago with, with deal book.

It's freaking incredible. Yeah, he was so good. I understand. 20 minutes in. I didn't see that one yet. Well, don't, but that's why I keep saying I understand. So don't play a drinking game with I understand in that interview. But it is phenomenal.

Like, you know how? We should do a watch party for that with a notice. It's a 28 minute interview and I sat there like riveted. With the best interviewer on CNBC. Yeah. Andrew Ross-Sorkin. Andrew Ross-R-Sorkin. He's, and he challenges Adam.

He's good in the interview. It's a tough interview. Oh, yeah. Adam Newman. I f*** with ARS. I understand. I f*** with ARS. I like him.

He's great. He's incredible. Also, though, and just side note, the visual of the interview is amazing because Andrew Ross Orkin is not a big man. And Adam Newman, of course, is a freaking giant. He's like six, seven or whatever. And so the, like, in addition to him being so fascinating, you almost have to go back and watch it over again just to like appreciate this small man in this huge chair and then this huge man in what looks like a small chair because visually it's amazing. Jason, he hits him like directly about buying buildings under his own name and then leasing him out to WeWork. And then Andrew, Andrew, we grew.

We grew fast. You have to understand in real estate, we have this connected party systems. He says something like that. He's like, no, no, this is normal in our business. That's not too worried about the pest makes a- Don't worry. It's growing and nobody had a problem when it's growing, okay? Babushka.

He's so calm and collected throughout the whole thing. I'm like, this is legitimately awesome. This guy rules. It's so great. I would invest in anything he did. with the understanding that he's going to screw me in some way, but I'm still going to be up to next. He's definitely a scurian.

When they crawl, knee pads for babies. I understand. Every time, like, he hits him with the hard question, and Adam's like, Andrew, I want to say to you, I understand. I understand. People have concerns.

I mean, it is incredible. This is my, these are my DMs. As we get closer to the All-in Summit, and we're like 30 days. We're coming in on like the 30-day window. We're dialing everything. thing. And now all the people who want to speak are coming out of the woodwork. And, like, they were like, hey, you want to have, I can get Ryan Breslo. And I was like,

hard pass. And they're like, hey, I can get Dom. I was like, hard pass. I was like, no. Get Adam. Open invite for Adam Newman. Get Adam. Adam. Newman, keynote all in summit. 100% yes. I may have another, I may have another major drop coming. Please don't. That's what I'm saying. Oh, God. I have another drop. I'm going to get Jack. Literally a nightmare. I'm going to I'm going to work on Jack. I should say I'm working on Jack. I think we might get a couple of more drops are coming.

A couple of more cool drops. But did you go to the space? We can talk a little bit about all on Summit here as we wrap the show up. Did you go see the space? We're seeing that today? Yes. Next. That is incredible.

Amazing. Okay. It's amazing. Okay. Yeah. All right. We have a couple of things for you to review in the Slack, actually. Toby points out that we may have to have Adam.

Adam Newman would be at the three parties. Yeah. Now we're just... Toby just pointed out we need to... We're going to just have to get a lot of... We just need to plan it. We just need to plan it. He'll just be like...

We're going to have to take people's cell phones at the door. No cameras. Tequila. It's going to look like the summer camp. That's accurate. Whatever that... Also, whatever that two-foot bottle of tequila is that they kept drinking, like I want that. Is that Casamigos?

Is that Casamigos? No. Is it like a thousand dollar? I don't remember. And it's like two feet tall. Don't... Don't know. No, no.

The one that looks like a mantelio. No, the one that looks like a mantelpiece, Jason. You always talk about it. No, there's the white one that looks like a mantelpiece. Yeah, yeah, that one. That's Casamigos. It looks like a brown one. No, it's not Casamigos.

It's something else. Casa Azul. No. Casa Azul. That's exactly what it is. Hold on. I got a look at an image. It's exactly what it is.

But the Casa Azul also comes in a brown bottle in addition to the more naturally. You actually are right. It's Don Julio. The one that they're drinking. Hold on. I'm putting it in that right here. Don Julio, 1942. Yes.

That is the, there's two. That's the one. Yes, these are the two In the movie Here are two in the same picture So Casa Azul is the white one With that silver top

That I think you can actually use to drink it at It was like a shot glass And then the one he likes was the Don Julio in 1942 Which is that brown amber bottle That he was like pouring on the steps outside his office And by the way it's like $200 a bottle Yeah Which is why you have that scene where they try it

And they're like oh damn Yeah There you go folks If you want to vomit, it will change your entire outlook on tequila. Like, once you realize it's a sipping drink and not a like mixing throw up drink. Yes. It's not for shots. It's for sipping.

If you're doing shots about stuff, you're crazy. Hey, everyone. Producer Nick here. I want to tell you about the SaaS Syndicate. If you're a founder of a SaaS company with a product and market, our investment team wants to talk to you. Head over to the syndicate.com slash SaaS, S-A-A-S to apply to raise from the SaaS syndicate. and you can join Jason's syndicate of over 9,000 accredited investors at the syndicate.com. Producer Justin here, no cool startup?

Check out openscouting.com, where anyone can refer a startup to our investment team here at launch. Even if you don't know the founder, if you're the first to flag a company for us and we decide to invest, you'll get 5K in cash or 10% of our carry. Hey, everybody, producer Rachel here. Are you an early stage startup that has product and market, some traction, and are looking to raise at least $500,000. Apply today to Remote Demo Day for your chance to pitch to over 9,000 investors in Jason's syndicate. Submit your application at RemoteDemoday.com.

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