This Week in Startups - News! EU Mandates USB-C, Facebook Files, China RE, Apple leaks, Stonkfluencers, SaaS Pod | E1289

Episode Date: September 24, 2021

In this all news show, Jason teases a new podcast dedicated to SaaS (1:46) and covers: the EU's planned USB-C mandate (7:44), China's property glut (13:12), TikTok Investors following congressional trades (20:24), Tim Cook's battle against leakers (25:47), the "Facebook Files" source (28:36), Bolt's 4-day workweek and more! Then he takes some listener questions (47:24).

We have an all news program for you today. You love all news. We're going to give you all news. The EU is planning on mandating that all smartphones use a USBC. That's directed directly at Apple. And China's got enough vacant property to house 90 million people. TikTok stock influencers are now trailing the stock picks of members of Congress. And Tim Cook is trying to figure out who's leaking all these documents at Apple.

Okay, and you've been following this incredible coverage by the Wall Street Journal of Facebook. They're calling it the Facebook files, all these leaks, while the Washington Post is reporting that the leaker is going to uncloke themselves. And a startup CEO from Bolt says he's going to be adopting a four-day-a-week workweek. Is that something you're interested in? Let's talk about it. Plus, I talk a little bit at the beginning about the new syndicate I'm launching, the SaaS syndicate. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by

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-C-O-WD.com slash twist. 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 sock-to report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist and Pipe. SaaS companies, this is for you.

Pipe helps you unlock your reoccurring revenue as upfront capital. Sign up in minutes and start trading on Pipe free for 12 months at pipe.com slash twist. All right, everybody, just before we get to the news, I wanted to make a quick announcement to the This Week in startup's family, including the All In family and, Angel, something really big we decided to do and we announced today at a webinar for our syndicate members is that we will be launching two new products next month in October. And you'll get to experience these shortly. The first is called the SaaS Syndicate.

As many of you know, I share my deal flow in startups with other angel investors. And I do that at the syndicate.com. The syndicate.com is essentially Jason Syndicate. It's a place where I share deal flow. We've done, I don't know, 200 deals or so, and some of them have gone on to do great things like density or calm or grin, steezy. We decided that we would add a syndicate, the All In Syndicate, which many of you know from the All In podcast. And now today we launched a third syndicate. The third syndicate we started is called the SaaS Syndicate.

And it is another investment club that accredited investors can join. at the syndicate.com slash SaaS. I took a long time to get the syndicate.com, but I really love that branding, that IP, that trademark that we've been building here. And if you go to the syndicate.com slash SaaS and you're accredited investor, you can sign up. If you are starting a SaaS company,

it's never too early to contact us. You can go to that webpage, and you could submit on that web page, your startup or another startup that you may have met. What is SaaS? You know, this is software as a service companies in enterprise, people making software for businesses, Salesforce, Zoom, Slack, Grin, Notion, any kind of company that sells a monthly fee to use their software, we want to invest in.

And I'd really like to put the first 500K into maybe one company a month. So we'll be willing with the SaaS syndicate to invest from free launch all the way to Series B, which would be, you know, typically a nine-figure company, over $100 million valuation, maybe 50 to 150 is most Series B is now. And Series A's are 25 to $50 million valuations. So we are going to have a best practice and a team who is focused on that vertical at my investment company, launch, and the syndicate. If you're accredited, you can sign up. If you are a founder, you can apply and maybe we will share you with those members. Now, in order to grow that, we decided we would add two more features to it.

The first is that we will be starting another podcast. That's right. All in and this week in startups, six podcasts a week. Why not make it seven, right? Just round it up to seven days a week. We're going to be starting this week in SaaS. This week in SaaS will be our new podcast. It's going to be a weekly podcast.

I'll host many of the episodes, but my team will also host episodes and we're going to focus exclusively on SaaS CEOs and experts and investors to discuss best practices of running and scaling SaaS businesses. So we'll get into the weeds. That doesn't mean I'm not going to have a SaaS company on this week in startups. But when we do this week in SaaS on Saturdays, we're going to do it on Saturdays, it's going to be a very, very focused program and it's going to get into the weeds. It's going to go deep.

And so we're not going to explain all the acronyms on that show. you might be a little lost at first if you're not familiar with SaaS, but you'll catch up quick. It'll be every Saturday. We're going to launch that podcast. Shortly, we launched today, The Syndicate. Finally, we are starting something called Open Scouting. And what this means is, if you would like to tell us about a company, we will, if you submit at the syndicate.com, that company, and we wind up investing in the company. And we haven't already been in touch with that company or we don't have them in our database yet.

We will give you $5,000 in cash or 10% of our carry if we wind up investing. This is not an official scouting program. We're calling it open scouting, which means anybody can scout a company. You as a listener could find an interesting SaaS company. Tell us the information about it. Maybe it's your friend's company. Maybe it's a company that you started using at your job. and you just think it's brilliant, you let us know, you fill out the forum, if we wind up

investing and somebody else hasn't already submitted it and we're not in touch with them, we will just give you straight up $5,000 if we invest or 10% of our carry on that first investment, which could be worth something quite nice. So we'll let you pick if you want cash or you want carry. And if somebody said, can I get half cash, half carry, 5% carry, 5% of the carry and $2,500, I think I'd be inclined to say yes. So a couple of big announcements from us and thank you for allowing me to tell you about them.

We don't take pitches for the podcast. Do not send us suggestions for who you want to have. If a PR person contacts us about a guest probably actually results in less chance of the guests getting on the podcast. We have an editorial team that talks to the super fans and our Slack about who they want to have on the show and then they bring me all the guests

and we have a big debate about it and we look for what we think is the most topic. Well, that's our job, not yours. So if you have a PR team, do not have them email us and pitch you. I do have CEOs who reach out to me. I think that's kind of baller if a CEO says, hey, I love the show. I've been listening to these episodes. If you ever want to have somebody on, you know, consider me.

That's fine. But please, no marketing PR agencies or podcasting agencies pitching us. We will not accept your guest. I mean, unless it's somebody incredibly baller. So thank you for allowing me to talk about that. Okay, the EU is planning on mandating that all new smartphones and electric devices include a USBC charging point. According to the verge of the European Commission, which is the executive arm of the EU, as you know, proposed plans to force electronics manufacturers to put a USBC charging port on all new devices.

This mandate obviously is going to impact Apple the most since their iPhones still use lightning connections. obviously Apple has been moving away from them. iPads have been using USBC for a while. The Verge notes that under this mandate customers will also be given the option to purchase devices without a charger, which is critical. And I think this is my hot take on this, the default should be no charger.

We all have USB chargers everywhere. Just like when you go into a grocery store in America or in Europe, they assume you've brought your own bags with you. and if you want a paper bag or a plastic bag or a reusable, you have to pay for them. That's how we should be with chargers now. USBC all the way, and if you want a charger, you pay extra.

The default box should come without a charger. That would be better for all of us. These things are littering everybody's house, and we all pay for it. So let's take that out, and let's have less packaging and less waste. Now, remember, in October of last year, we covered Apple announcing they would start removing chargers

as the default. when you purchase your new iPhone starting with iPhone 12, that was episode 1123. We had a lot of fun with Apple explaining to us what a great feature this was. But, you know, they're not wrong. It is very wasteful. And so the Verge also notes that this proposal only covers devices that use a wire, not wireless chargers. For me, I think what's happening here is that in the two-year grace period, which the EU is talking about if this mandate actually happens, you know, there's going to be a 24-month to comply grace period. I think what this is all

about is Apple is going to get rid of the port. I think there'll be no USBC port on Apple devices. I think they're going to go with, and I know this is going to be hard for data, but for charging, maybe they'll just have a MagSafe type thing where the MagSafe will also do data. So I bet you there's some USBC MagSafe wireless connectivity solution coming. And then maybe in 24-month, months when you buy a phone, they took the microphone jack out so we don't have headphones anymore. I think they do the same with the USBC charger. It'll just be like the only holes on your phone are going to be things like audio and speakers. So this is absolutely fantastic, I think, and a great idea. The next piece of this I think also is, I don't know if you've been following this charger

that is coming from IKEA. I don't know how to pronounce this. word. S-J-O-M-A-R-K-E. Quay-M-A-R-K-A is a wireless charger that IKEA is sold out of. It's a $40 quay or wireless charger. You know, the QI is a wireless charger. You can see an image on the screen showing it. Basically, all of the desks we buy in the future are going to have this quay charging built into the desk and you're going to be able to drill right underneath it and it'll probably come with one of these by default soon and it's going to be absolutely awesome. It's pretty obvious to me, as I've pointed out, with IKEA now selling this and making it a big focus, that every device you buy, every side table is going to have a plug. And you're going to plug that side table in and that side table is going to have multiple chargers on it.

And there'll be some little dot or LED built into every desk or charger to lay your phone, your laptop, your iPad onto it and have a charge or even your AirPods or my favorite Pixels. I think pixel buds. I think pixel buds, the $99 version, much better than Apple AirPods. So it's a great future. Okay, it's time for another R Crowd deal of the week. Right now, you can join our crowd's investment in consumer physics. According to the deal memo, consumer physics has developed the first portable lab grade device that can analyze material at a molecular level. That sounds fascinating. This helps farmers boost production, improve efficiency, and minimize waste. Consumer physics has grown revenue 100% year over year and is used by over 50 global enterprise customers according to their deal memo. And speaking of growth, do you wish you were in early on some of the best performing IPOs of 2019 and 2020? Well, our crowd investors were and now you can join them.

With our crowd, accredited investors can invest directly, easily, and most importantly, early. Our crowd investors have benefited from companies IPOing like BeyondMeet or companies. companies being bought by folks like Intel, Nike, Microsoft, Oracle, and my personal favorite, Uber. So, here is your call to action. Our Crowd's accredited investors have already invested over $1 billion in growing tech companies. If you're an accredited investor, you can join OurCrow for free at OUR, CROWD.com slash twist TWIST and review the current deal memos. There's no payment evolved until you decide to invest. That's OurCrowd.com. twist to sign up for free.

Okay, China has enough vacant property right now, according to a report, to house over 90 million people. Or the entire population of Germany, larger than the population of France, according to the Financial Times. This entire discussion has come up because of Evergrand,

something we've been talking about for the last couple of months in relation to Tether and the commercial paper that Tether might own or might not own in Chinese companies. And the last time we spoke about Evergrand was on episode 1280 back on September 9th, 11 days later on Monday, September 20th, the Dow dropped, this was this Monday,

as much as 971 points due to the fallout and the fear of contagion from Evergrand. It wound up only closing down 2%, but it felt a little panicky on Monday. An article published on Tuesday in the Financial Times revealed some shocking stats about China's real estate industry, capped off by the approximate $40 billion collapse of Evergrand, which could be much more. Again, China is very opaque.

We don't know what's going on over there. Who knows the scale of the fraud or these bonds and the collapse will find out over time, or maybe we'll never know. According to the article in the Financial Times, China's real estate sector is, quote, so overbuilt that it threatens to relinquish its longstanding role as the prime drive

of Chinese economic growth and instead become a drag on it. Fascinating. Sound familiar. We had our own crisis over real estate. When real estate bubbles get going, it captures the imagination of the public. These houses start flipping, people start buying, and a mania quickly ensues. It looks like China is going through that. And, you know, let me play a clip here. What you're going to see right now is the result of, I think, a lot of this being overbuilt. You're seeing 15 unfinished high-rise apartments in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming being demolished before ever being used. It's pretty amazing to watch 15 homes, 15 giant buildings go down at once, especially when we're sitting here in America. I think we need 7 million more homes,

and they're just knocking them down there by blowing them up. This video almost doesn't look real. It looks like some CGI of the day after or some crazy dystopian, you know, meter hitting Earth. Who knows what exactly is going on here? Maybe there's something wrong with these buildings. Maybe they had foundation problems.

Maybe people are not moving to that area. So it's hard to know when you see these videos. I always look at them with a, bit of a questioning eye as to what's really going on here, but they're literally blowing up housing. According to the article, Chinese real estate industry accounts for 29% of the country's gross GDP. The 90 million number of the article came from calculation by Logan Wright, a director at Rhodium Group, which is a firm that sells independent research on China's financial and political landscape. Here is how Wright calculated the number. Because I always ask

my team when we're doing research on this. You know, the journalists were right stuff. People will share stuff on Twitter. Can we find where the original information came from and just maybe dig a little deeper as to where this came from? And here's how they came up with our calculation. Unsold housing inventory in China is approximately 3 billion square meters. Three billion square meters can house 30 million families. The average family size in China is three people. So three times 30, 90 million people can be housed with 3 billion vacant square meters of real estate. And, by the way, a country with 90 million people would be the 16th largest one in the world, bearing in mind that there are over 260 countries in the world.

They sit right between Vietnam and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in terms of population. And according to the article, China's property growth at all cost model might be coming to an end quickly. Leland Miller, the CEO of China, Bejewbuk, a firm that sells research on China to institutional investors, had the following quote, The leadership in Beijing has been more worried about Chinese growth than anyone in the West.

There is a recognition that the old build, build, build playbook does not work anymore and that is actually getting dangerous. The leadership now appears to be thinking that it can't wait any longer to change the growth model.

We are all set for a roller coaster ride and policy and economic growth. I would not be surprised if a decade from now China's GDP growth was one or two percent. So, just to give you an idea and some context around China, they've been growing their GDP year over year since 2000, to give some context on how rapidly China's GDP has been growing.

From 2000 to 2009, China's GDP grew on average 10.4% per year. U.S. averages about 1.9% during that period, and the U.S. average is weighed down by the U.S. GDP, regressing by 2.5% from 2008 and 2009 during the peak of the housing crisis. So from 2010 to 2019, China's GDP grew an average of 7.6 per year. U.S. average 2.3% growth in the same time period according to macro trends. So during that time period from 2013 to 2018, China was responsible for 28% of the worldwide GDP, according to the international monetary fund.

You know them as the IMF. That 28% of worldwide GDP growth was double the U.S. number. Obviously, China's growing fast. The Financial Times article highlights other major red flags in the Chinese real estate market. Land sales by local governments in China have collapsed falling 90% year-over-year-over-year from September 2020 to September 2021. And according to the article, land sales generate about one-third of local government revenues in China.

So now when we start talking about contagion, you can start to understand how this could all come apart. People were investing, investing, investing, and now maybe that housing isn't as needed. and the basically the music stops. The revenues, obviously, when they sell this land, help pay the principal and interest on $8.4 trillion in debt issued by several thousand local government financing vehicles. These vehicles raise capital by issuing selling bonds

from which they use the proceeds to fund infrastructure projects like overbuilding real estate. So the music is stopping. Feels like a giant house of cards, But in China, they can just print more money, they can do whatever they want, they can bail people out. And that means this probably will not be a Lehman Brothers type moment, the contagion that we saw here, because the CCB can just do whatever they want. It's one of the great aspects of being an authoritarian government. They can wipe out debt, they can print more money and just basically do whatever they want without anybody's approval.

It's a authoritarian country. So something to totally watch and keep an eye on. because this is going to have impact on the U.S. market. Okay, TikTok stock influencers are following or tailing the stock picks of members of Congress for gains and views according to an NPR article from Tuesday. Remember, we covered the Twitter outrage surrounding Nancy Pelosi's husband trading options back on episode 1242. In that case, Pelosi's husband was caught buying millions of dollars of call options

or betting the stock would go up on Amazon a few weeks before. the Department of Defense, canceled the $10 billion Jedi Cloud computing contract that had been given to Microsoft. What amazing timing for the Pelosi family. The rumors of this news sent Amazon stock to an all-time high of over $3,700 a share, and Pelosi's husband made millions just on that one trade. The account, unusual Wells on Twitter, which is an interesting one to follow, reveal Pelosi's husband had a string of success with call options, which were, curiously linked to regulatory news. These included Tesla calls before the Biden administration set a goal to have half of all new vehicles

sold by 2030 to be electric, and Microsoft calls right before they were given a $22 billion government contract to supply U.S. Army troops with AR headsets for training. Once all of this information was made public, people on social media were mostly outrage. However, some of these TikTokers decided to start tallying the Pelosi investment. MPR quoted TikTokers saying, Shouts out to Nancy Pelosi the stock market's biggest well, CEO watch list on TikTok said. She knew and you would have known if you had followed her portfolio.

I'm at the point where if you can't beat them, join them, Chris Joseph's on TikTok. To be clear, these two accounts make money by selling stock tips and alert. So their business model is a data business like Pitchbook or SMP. So maybe they're just being cheeky or funny. What these TikTokers don't emphasize is that there's a delay on these disclosures. That can be up to 45 days when a congressperson actually makes the trade. These are called PTRs.

You may have heard periodic transaction reports. For example, in her August 20th PTR, it reported trades Pelosi made as early as July 13, 37 days before. So you might be trailing when you're tallying by too long to actually make a great trade. this info is a good data point, but you aren't actually able to replicate the portfolio in real time. Hedge funds always have to report their trades, but that doesn't mean you can copy them.

For example, in 2020, Bill Ackman made a massive short that generate $2.6 billion by buying complex out of the money, credit protection on high-eo bond indexes. But if you copied this trade when you heard about it, you would have lost almost $27 million, according to the story. And so, as I mentioned in 1242, two, correlation does not equal causation in all cases. The solution I propose was a once-per-year

training window for all elected officials and their spouses. So let me know your thoughts on that. If you're in government, I think you should be maybe limited to quarterly or maybe twice a year indexing of your funds. And I think Congress people should be paid, you know, similar to CEO pay, maybe $500,000 a year, maybe even, you know, for senators, a million dollars a year. Why not pay them top rates so that really talented people would take those jobs and be able to afford a nice house? You know, and then working in government would pay commensurate with working in the corporate world, right? Would you be opposed to a senator making, you know, there's two centers from each state? So if they got paid a million dollars a year, we'd spend $100 million on senators.

Seems like a good idea to me. Hey everybody, I thought I would bring Christina Casioopo. I pronounced it correct. I'm hoping. You got it. Yep. All right. You're the founder of Vanta. People have been hearing your ads on the pod for the last year. And I thought it'd be fun to have you on and you to explain why you created Vanta and what SOC2 is and why it's important. People get it right. So let's start with what is SOC2 for people who are just realizing they have to become SOC2 compliant? For sure. So SOC2 is. at a tie level, it's sort of a customer asking you to prove your security. Now, these audit firms that you partner with, you prepare everything, but you still need to have an auditor. So who gets the order? You or the company that is engaging Vanta? Yeah, absolutely. So one part of what we do at Vanta is we've built a network of audit firms, and there's a couple dozen we work with today. So we're

happy to broker introductions, help companies kind of choose what sort of auditor or firm would be best for them. And then the other part of the pitch is, you know, that auditor knows Vanta, understands and trusts our data. And so the audit will be faster and cheaper if one of our network firms are used. All right. Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for coming on and telling the audience why you should get your SOC 2, when you should get it and how you should do it. And you've been very nice to our audience, giving them $1,000 off, which is a really significant and generous offer. Go to VANTA.com slash twist. V-A-N-T-A-com slash twist to get $1,000 off your sock, too. Thanks, Christina. I appreciate it.

Thank you so much. Cheers now. Okay, Tim Cook is trying to figure out which Apple employees have been leaking, his internal memos and emails. The Verge ran a story on Wednesday with a very trolling title. Tim Cook says employees who leaked memos

do not belong at Apple, according to leaked memo. So it's really hard to find out who's been leaking stuff from your company, and as you know, Apple employees have become, you know, suddenly very vocal. You remember they demanded some small portion of them demanded that Apple take a stance

on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A small number of them had strong feelings about Antonio Garcia Martinez is hiring and firing. And of course, there was some complaining about work from home and should they ever go back to work at their multi-billion dollar headquarters. Just to put this in perspective, Apple has 147,000 direct full-time equivalent employees per their most recent annual report, which is about the size of Bellevue, Washington, the 186 largest city in the U.S. And even if you take out the Apple Store employees, it's still a very large number. LinkedIn reports 47,867 are in the San Francisco Bay Area and another 7.5,000 work in both New York City and Austin. So corporate leaks, like this one, is the reason why Amazon built their own

conferencing in chat platform called Amazon Chime. So they have control instead of using a competitor or open platform in Tim Cook's latest email obtained by the verge. He wrote, quote, I want to reassure you that we are doing everything in our power to identify those who leaked. As you know, we do not tolerate disclosures of confidential information, whether it's product IP or details of a confidential meeting. We know that. that the leakers constitute a small number of people. We also know that people who leak confidential information do not belong here. And so Apple is not the only player dealing with this. And I do think this is a generational kind of moment for these companies. I believe that a lot of younger employees,

maybe millennials and even into Gen Z. Maybe they have a distrust of big companies, even though they go work for them. Maybe they have stronger feelings about their personal beliefs, their political beliefs, social justice beliefs, work from home beliefs, whatever those, that belief said is, they might be more loyal to those beliefs than they are to their paycheck or the company they work for. And that's fine. It's the nature of how the world is changing. People are even looking at their own employers in a skeptical way. And we know this because somebody is obviously having a crisis of conscience at Facebook because the Wall Street Journal has been publishing this series, they call the Facebook files. So these include the reports we've been talking to

talking to you about on this podcast. The internal studies about Instagram showing the body images were made worse in one in three teen girls and that they ignore the data. Human trafficking on Facebook in the developing world. Facebook's algorithm optimizing for angry, you know, posts, and angry people and commenters in Zuckerberg refusing to fix it. And so Jeff Horowitz, the Wall Street Journal reporter, who had obtained leaked Facebook documents and led the Facebook files reporting, appeared as a guest on today's episode of the Lawfare podcast, which is a podcast I found out about on Preet Bihar's podcast,

stay tuned with Preet. Here is a two-minute and 30-second clip, and I'll come back on the other side. Yeah, so the getting of documents, details are obviously somewhat sensitive there, given that the entities that provided them to us have chosen not to reveal themselves. But I would say, look, it's not going to be a surprise that given the range of topics covered there, that the source of this stuff, you know, was in the integrity type operation of Facebook, right? And integrity, as you know, is this extremely broad term that kind of includes everything from like content quality to spam to, you know, like whether there is a genocide going on that might or might not have something to do with social media. And I think the reason why we've seen a whole bunch of information coming out of those organizations inside Facebook, it's not just that those folks, you know, are just like somehow chatier than I've ever.

else. I think the thing is that people there have been asked to tackle some really, really serious problems, like more serious, I think, than Facebook, you know, obviously that Facebook understands and the outside world does. And they've come up with solutions or what they believe to be at least mitigations. And then they have a hard time getting them through. And I think you'll, you know, in the kind of the response to this whole series, you'll see on kind of on Twitter, I've been really gratified to see a whole bunch of people who know this area really, really well. And because they worked in it for years, basically taking the company to task for, you know, because when the company pushes back on a reporting, says things are cherry-picked,

says that, you know, the reason they didn't do things is because they were bad ideas or that, you know, the cure was worse than the disease. You know, a whole bunch of former integrity people have just started popping up saying, like say what now? Like where the hell are you coming up with that from? Right. And I think that's something really valuable and important. So I guess I'd say, I sort of feel like, yes, there was a lot of work that went into this in terms of getting the documents and, you know, sort of building relationships in which there was enough trust for that to happen. But that said, there's like a pretty strong sense of pressure, I think, on some folks internally to make sure information like this gets out

because they don't feel like it's being handled right internal. Okay, folks, there you have it. I think it's actually a very interesting clip because what this says to me is that the people who are in the integrity operation are extremely frustrated with Zuckerberg and management. In other words, they believe that these are serious problems. They came to Facebook to work on these serious problems. They have solutions and ideas of how to fix them. And I think they believe that they are not being listened to and these things are not being handled correctly.

So the Washington Post just reported that Senator Marcia Blackburn said that the whistleblower who leaked the Facebook files to Congress plans to reveal their identity. So this is really interesting breaking news. We're going to have somebody who, you know, who knows if they're high up. You don't need to be high up in an organization sometimes to have this information. It could be somebody's executive assistant. It could be a researcher. It could be somebody who's an intern. I mean, a lot of times this information is sitting there on a corporate server,

and this is going to be super interesting. The whistleblower purportedly behind the leaks, meanwhile, is turning over documents to lawmakers on Capitol Hill and as indicated they plan to soon go public, according to a senator who said to be in contact with him. So this is a really interesting turn of events, and this could get quite dramatic. Zuckerberg also made light of the Wall Street Journal reporting on Tuesday when he joked about the media finally crossing the line when the New York Times incorrectly stated that he was

riding an electric surfboard instead of a hydrofoil where you pump up and down to create the working. And this is just a terrible look for Zuck. I mean, here's the quote. Look, it's one thing for the media to say false things about. my work, but it's crossing the line to say I'm riding an electric surfboard when that video clearly shows a hydrofoil that I'm pumping with my own legs. You know, and this is the kind of arrogant and insensitive approach that people are not going to respond well to when he's brought

in front of Congress, senators, Congress people. You know, we're talking about self-harm by teenage girls. We're talking about anorexia, body dysmorphia, suicide, anxiety, depression, and Zuckerberg is making light of fake news and his quite privileged life, you know, getting to ride hydrofoils and electric surfboards and his land in Hawaii and his lakehouse in Tahoe. I mean, talk about being out of touch with the moment, not reading the room. You know, the people who are literally leaking this information are concerned about human trafficking and Zuckerberg is being cavalier

about his you know massive privilege and you know owning a lot of real estate on beautiful bodies of water pro tip Zuck you know like this is just a really bad look you should take this stuff seriously

and I think he's taking a very Trumpian approach which has never apologized and to maybe mock the people who are criticizing you we're not talking about leaking the iPhone 13 here. We're not talking about leaking the next Blackberry or a merger or acquisition. We're talking about very serious topics here about human suffering. That's what this is about, right?

It's about democracy. It's about anxiety, depression, human trafficking. I mean, this is the darkest stuff that societies have to deal with. And so Zuckerberg is really teeing himself. up for, I think, a lot of bad press here. And beyond the bad press, I think maybe some action to break up Facebook, sanction them, and really not getting himself any kind of allies here. A very simple way for him to take ownership of this would be to say, you know what, here's all the research we do, and we're sharing that research. And for parents, if you don't want your children on the service,

we're going to start, you know, giving you the ability to monitor your children's activity by you controlling their accounts. So if you have a 13 to 16 year old, maybe that account is controlled by the parents' Instagram or Facebook account and they can use it provisionally for up to four hours a week and all their activity. If they're going to post something, their parents can approve it. This sounds crazy. It sounds Orwellian? No. I mean, If you're a parent, you let your child drive a car and you have some rules for driving that car. A lot of people would argue using social media, it seems to be as dangerous for certain children as driving a car. And you would not let them drive a car unsupervised?

Why would you let them use social media unsupervised? That's where we're going to get to as a society, I think. And if you have an iPhone and you've got your family on it, when my daughters want to load an app, it asks my wife and I to approve it. and this is a wonderful feature by Apple and it makes me feel great about Apple as a company. I would never put my children on Android devices or Zuckerberg's products specifically because I don't think he's thinking about

the safety of my child or my family. I think he's specifically thinking about the money he can make for his children and his family. I think it really comes down to that. I don't think he's thinking about the safety of our children. I think he's thinking about how much money he can make and give to his children I hate to say it so bluntly.

So my producers ask me, could you see Zuckerberg saying, screw it and abandoning the integrity department, firing everyone because he doesn't care? Yeah, I think he's taking a very Trumpian approach, and I think it looks increasingly worse for him to be taking this approach. I'm curious for the people who are watching this live.

What are your thoughts? Would you let your children use Facebook or Instagram, let's say teens, 12 to 16? do you let them use those services? Do you monitor their use of those services? Do you feel safe about them using the services? Tell me in the comments on YouTube Live or Twitter, live streaming, Periscope, or LinkedIn.

None of this is surprising. It is not different than the tobacco industry. I think, you know, the tobacco is, people have a big reaction to comparing it to tobacco because that's physically bad for you. I think that's what we're learning in society is that like the negative impacts on mental health could be more acute than even smoking,

because smoking will kill you in your 50, 60, 70. We have a problem with young adults killing themselves and suicide becoming in certain categories. You can look it up. Certain categories, a suicide in teens and young adults and people in their 20s is now becoming greater. And sometimes that suicide is done through overdoses and opioids, which people would argue is self-medicating.

And, you know, if you include that, I think it's pretty clear. And, you know, Zen Profits asks in our comments here, how would government enforce such limitations? The government shouldn't be making these limitations. The company should be thinking proactively and putting limitations in. So if you use TikTok, if you use it too long, they'll say, hey, you've been scrolling for a while, I want to take a break. I think Instagram should only allow, you know, kids to use the product for X number of hours per day and week. And their parents should have to, you know, manage their account.

That's just my feeling on it. I want to welcome Harry Hurst. You know him as the co-CEO and co-founder of the company Pipe. You've been on Twitter over the past year. You've probably heard me and my besties, a number of which got their beaks wet, talking about all the excitement around Pipe and their fundraising and the product they're bringing to market. I thought I'd have Harry come on and explain it to y'all. Harry, welcome to the program.

Thank you, Jason. The people who are buying these contracts, the annualized contracts, are looking to make 10% on their money. And the person who's selling that in advance believes they can put that capital to work, that would help grow their revenues more than 10%. Is that a way to look at it? The simple math, if you take, for example, 95 cents on the dollar, and you have $100,000 trade, can I take $95,000 today, invest that into, say, sales and marketing for growth, and generate

$5,000 in net new ARR as a result of investing that? If the answer is yes, which I hope it is for any growing company, your cash flow break-even on the trade, if not cash-flow positive, on the trade, and you have the net new ARR, and, you know, Bessemer Cloud Index, not sure where it is today, but anywhere between 10 to 20x on that additional 5,000 can be seen as your profit on the trade. So what we're trying to do at Pipe is turn people from having a borrower's mentality where they would traditionally go to, say, a lender and borrow money to a trader's mentality where they think that their recurring revenue streams as an asset.

All right. Thanks again, Harry, for coming on the pod and explaining that with Pipe.com, there is no debt, no loans, and most importantly to me, as an angel investor, no dilution. If you sign up at pipe.com slash twist, they'll eliminate all your trading fees for one full year. What a generous offer. Pipe.com slash twist so you can save up to tens of thousands of dollars. Happy piping, everybody. Okay, a company called Bolt is adopting a four-day work week to see if that will create more output from their employees. Bolt is a competitor for fast one-click checkout.

You know some other companies in that space. although Spotify does have a feature like this for its all Shopify merchants. According to the CEO, Ryan Breslow's Twitter, Bolt's last round was closed in August for $33 million at a $4 billion valuation. And he says, the biggest lesson I've learned in building a $4 billion company is it's all about the people. I'm thrilled to announce today that Bolt is the first tech unicorn to officially shift to a four-day work week. here's why we did it and how we came to that decision. He continues. Naval has a philosophy on work that describes it best.

Work like a lion, not a cow. What does that mean? Cows graze all day, slow pace, same activity, day in and day out. That is how most jobs are set up. But what if we worked like lions, short bursts of energy, high intensity, and then rest and recover for the next sprint? High performance isn't about how much you put in. It's about how much you get out.

cue the four-day work week. At Bolt, we fundamentally believe that we can get more work done at a higher quality in a four-day week. Here are the five main principles that guided our decision. Principle one, increased balance leads to increased output.

Principle two, clear minds lead to better decisions. Principle three, increase the intensity. Principle four, tired kills creativity and principle five, interesting people make a stronger team. I think it's interesting. And it's interesting when you have a company that is flush with cash, that already has product, market fit, and is printing money. That makes it super easy for folks to be able to implement stuff like this.

Now, certain positions might have a certain level of intensity that don't allow for this. Certain salespeople might not like to work four days a week. They might like to work five days a week. Certain people might like to work six hours a day, five days a week for 30 hours a week as opposed to four days, ten hours a day. And with everybody moving remote, I think most people are enjoying maybe doing a little bit of work all day and then breaking up their day as they please. So I think flexibility to me is the greater effort for people or the greater benefit for people. That's why people are embracing gig work so much,

because they can literally make their own hours. But sure, this could be a recruiting benefit. I know that Treehouse's Ryan Carson discussed this with me on the podcast. And, you know, the thing that you're going to, you might find is that by signaling this is a four-day workweek company, you may start attracting people who are maybe not as intense about building an outlier success. So this is riddled with, you know, a lot of red flags for me, but also creatively, maybe in today's day and age, giving people this is a benefit. I know at inside.com I found a lot of writers.

Sometimes they would want to be full time and work 40, 50 hours a week, 60 hours a week, get benefits. And then I had some that said, I just want to work half time because I want to work on my book or this other project. I just want to write one newsletter for you, four hours a day. And so I was thinking at inside.com that we would let people pick. You can go halftime, you go full time, you get half as many days off when you're half time. You get half as many days off. You get half a the benefits, it's a little mechanically hard to do. But as your company becomes, uh, you know, more successful and you have more margin, you can come up with all kinds of different concepts like this. The 40 day, the 40 hour work week, five hour, five day a week work week. Yeah, sure. Maybe you

could build an entire company around a four day one. I think everything's up for grabs. I'm curious to people watching live. Uh, what do you think of this idea? Would you be more attracted to work for company, if it had a four-day intense week versus a five-day, let's call it, you know, jogging versus a four-day running. And somebody says to me here in the comments, police, nurses, et cetera, it won't work. That's actually a fair point. You know, some shift work is shift work, and it's kind of hard to make that work for people. And everybody wants to get paid more.

I think we have a, right now, a record, 11 million job openings, and there's 1.3 jobs, or 1.4 jobs I heard on CNBC for every person who is not employed. So we are in a suddenly find ourselves in a employee empowered market. People are just not going to work

because they've made a bunch of money in crypto. They've made other life decisions. They have gig work. And boy, is it stunning to CSGO from a small number of people being unemployed to a bunch of people just opting out of employment or traditional employment?

Four day running all the way. More control for the employees? to engineer their day. Okay. Flexibility is the most important thing for me. And I like tasks versus hourly. Why should I require to stick around if I'm faster at task? I think that the task-based economy might be something that will make a comeback here. Mechanical Turk was something that was derided.

Oh my God, you're making people into machines. They're getting paid per task. And when people get paid per task, get all these weird behaviors that occur. And that was one of the things that killed a lot of the early, on-demand companies that were doing like TaskRabbit, they'd say, oh, I want you to clean out this flower bed in my backyard. It's a $50 job. And it could take five hours.

It could take one person, two hours. People would bid on that stuff. And the people who were slow were, you know, write blog posts. Oh, my God, I'm getting paid less than minimum wage. The people who did it in two hours and got paid $25 an hour and say, ha-ha, I'm getting paid double minimum wage to do this. And this is a better deal for me. So it's kind of an interesting concept.

I wish them well in trying it. All right, let's take some questions from our audience. Hey, Jason, big fan. What's your opinion on the Ray Ban Facebook collaboration? Okay, I don't trust Facebook. You shouldn't trust Facebook. And based on the Facebook leaks, the Facebook papers, I think we're all going to come to the conclusion

that they are not taking their role in society and the footprint and the impact they have seriously to use any of their hardware products that have a microphone or camera, you would have to be absolutely out of your mind to put anything Facebook related on your mobile phone, on your glasses, that portal they had,

where they had the Muppets, I think, doing commercials for it, is absolutely crazy. Do not put any Facebook devices in your home. In fact, I'm thinking of, I took Facebook off my phone a while ago. You know, I use Instagram because I kind of like it and I got a lot of friends on it.

but yeah it's kind of hard to give up isn't it it's hard to extract yourself the thing i did to really extract myself is i used facebook connect to log into everything because it was so convenient i stopped that i disconnected facebook connect you know i went into my settings turned off all authentications i never ever ever log in with facebook connect i wouldn't do that and i would never ever buy those glasses and i would never buy their portal or whatever their you know interactive tool is i think people are going to start voting with their time and just getting off of social media in general is a good idea and spend more time with your friends and family. All right. Next question. Hey Jason, what are your favorite SaaS products and why? Well, obviously,

we live in Slack and Notion all day long. We're using Restream more and more to run the podcast, and I absolutely love that as well. So I think Notion's become quite a game changer. We like Zapier and if this, then that as well, because it helps us build glue between things. So those are some of my favorites. Notion, I think, has really had a great impact on the company. And Squarespace, I love to for beautifully designed websites. All right. Next up, a question.

What are my thoughts on the Tesla Plaid? You know, my wife and I were getting too many speeding tickets with these Teslas. And so instead of Tesla Plaid and going zero to 60 and under two seconds, I have been putting it on show and been putting a speed limiter on all the cars we own from Tesla because I think getting speeding tickets is a bummer and getting points on your license is a bummer. So I don't want to go any faster. I've had these Teslas forever. And my lord, going zero to 60 in four seconds or less is an absolutely crazy experience.

And going in 1.9 seconds or under two seconds, like literally, The stuff that goes flying into the backseat is crazy. So it is an awesome technological advancement. I'm tempted to buy the new model S or X and trade in. We have an X and I was thinking about trading it in. But I think I'm just going to go a cyber truck. So that's my plan. I really want the cyber truck.

I think that looks amazing and dope. The other thing I like is really the increasing the range. So for me at this point in my life, 50 years old, I'm taking the scenic route and I like the 400 mile battery. To me, 400 mile battery and the self-driving those kind of features to me are the attractive ones in a Tesla.

I cannot buy a car without autopilot anymore. It's just when I drive a car without autopilot is so frustrating for me to not be perfectly in the lane, perfectly distance from the person in front of me, and be able to, you know, use navigation or something. Now, I'm not texting while I'm driving, but when you have self-driving on, it's such a smoother ride when you're going to Tahoe

or sometimes I like to take the drive down to L.A. as opposed to flying because it's five or six hours to drive, it's three to four hours to fly. I kind of like the long drive. I like listening to an audio book and clearing my mind. So I just want to have 400, mile range would be really delightful. I've been getting that 320 pretty consistently on my Model Y, and that's nice for going to Tahoe,

but to L.A. I got to stop, and I love the idea of not stopping and just boom, putting it in autopilot and just zipping down the five from L.A. to San Francisco or going out to Tahoe. Really great stuff. Okay, here's a question from Samuel B. How long term is too long term for a company? It's a very generic question. I like to, with the early stage startups, you know, let's say they're in the first year or two, I like when they build a one-year plan and a two-year plan and a 12-week plan and have all of those kind of sinking with each other. Because those people who make plans have a greater chance of success. I think winging it and not having a plan, really not a good idea.

You really want to think about the amount of runway you have, how much money. you'll need to hit those, you know, milestones. I do also find that some of the great founders do think in decades. And so thinking about, hey, when Uber gets to 100 million people, what would, you know, the second decade look like, okay, now we're going to have the Uber eats and the delivery business. We'll have the trucking business. We'll have self-driving.

We'll have VTOLs. A lot of what Travis was doing with Uber in the first decade when he was there, you know, a lot of those ideas, I'm now seeing in decade two. of Uber, things we talked about in years one and two, he was dead on. He was talking about Uber freight. He was talking about self-driving. He was talking about V-tols. He was talking about bikes and micromobility and taking public transit and getting you from point A to point B, helicopters, all of these things were things that Travis was dabbling in and he saw in the second decade. A lot of the things Elon talked about with Tesla in the first decade

are now coming true in the second decade. So I think thinking in decades as well is an interesting one. I thought about my first decade of angel investing and then I thought about my second decade. I'm now my second decade. And today I launched that second or the third syndicate. We're doing the SaaS syndicate. That's a big part of my thinking about, okay, in the first decade,

it was about me and investing and my decisions on what to invest in. The second decade is about the 9,000 angel investors in my community and how we invest together. And so I've been thinking, hey, how can investments be occurring on the syndicate in the second decade that I didn't lead, that I didn't personally say, let's invest in this company, that maybe the community found and got some amount of equity for or cash with our scouting program, the open scouting program, and then maybe, you know, the community voting with their dollars and saying, hey, you know, these hundred syndicate members want to invest in this SaaS company that the Open Scouts found, right?

So somebody in our audience of this being startups found a company, submitted it, my team diligence it, sent it out to the syndicate members in SaaS. They decided they wanted to invest. And then, you know, whether I invest or not was secondary to the process, right? So I think a lot about the process of supporting founders and investing in them. And so, yeah, permission granted to think in decades, but then to take actions every day that maybe impact that quarter or the next, you know, eight quarters. So there's good to have the big vision moments when you go on a nice hike or you're at

the beach, you're going skiing. Yeah, sure, think in decades for your life. But then you're going to have to act and look at the steps in front of you so you don't trip, right? Some people are so big vision, they never execute. That's not good either. So it's a balance. Great question.

All right, we'll take one more question. When you see me looking to the right, I'm looking on my beautiful Dell monitor at the questions coming in over Restream. Question from our LinkedIn audience from Benjamin, is the VC Angel World competitive or collaborative? Great question. Early stage, it's very collaborative

because people are writing 10K, 50K,000, 100K, K, 250K checks, and these rounds are typically $500,000 to $3 million, and you might have 20,34, 40 investors. So it is very, very collaborative. Now, VC world used to be very collaborative. You'd have one or two VC firms, maybe participating in a series A. Sometimes you'd have a major investor doing the series A and then somebody else would fill in with a smaller investment. So you'd have like a primary and a secondary kind of venture firm. One would do $2 million. One would do $500K.

Angels would do $500K. Now that the funds are much bigger, it's becoming sharper elbowed. If you don't get a lot of firms are just saying, we want the entire Series A and we want all the angels to waive their pro rata. We need to get to 20%. And they really care about the sizing of their ownership state. And certainly with Series B and C, with Tiger and these other folks coming down, it's getting really, really, really competitive. And a lot of the VC firms are complaining not just about fighting between VC firms to get all the shares, but these new people like Tiger Global coming down or Co2, all these late stage firms coming down and doing very quick fundings at very high prices.

So yeah, it's a very interesting moment in time. That's why I like doing something early.