This Week in Startups - News! Fireproof homes, Amazon’s college plan, Facebook copies Snap, Notion Acquires Automate.io & more | E1280

Episode Date: September 10, 2021

Rapid fire news episode. First, Jason covers how a fire proofed home survived the Caldor fire, Amazon's plan to provide college for all its employees, Facebook copying Snap's glasses, Notion acquiring Automate.io & more. At the end, Jason takes a few questions from listeners and shares a story from when he ran Silicon Alley Reporter.

Okay, we've got an amazing all-news program for you today. And I take some very emotional, deep questions at the end of the podcast, talking about motivation and feeling like you're not part of the inside crew and my journey. Just great, great questions I took live from the YouTube and the live streaming audience. But on today's podcast, Facebook is coming out with smart glasses, copying Snapchat once again. The BoardApe auction closed at $24 million. And Amazon is including educational. benefits to their part-time workers to get them their bachelor's degree. Great job, Jeff Bezos,

their terrible job suing Elon and trying to stop progress through lawsuits. And I want to talk about our foil-wrapped homes, that blanket idea I've had for a couple of years. Well, people are doing it. And an actual home was saved in the Caldorf wildfires by somebody putting, I kid you not, fire-resistant blankets on top or, you know, some kind of material on top of a home. And I think there's a great startup idea in there. I want to flesh out with you. Finally, Evergrand is China. Second largest REIT by revenue and their stock is falling and their credit is going down. Stick with us. It's an amazing episode. 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-W-D.com slash 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. And, NOVAVO free business banking. If your bank charges outrageous fees, you need a bank account that's built for small business. Get your free business banking account in just 10 minutes at banknovo.com slash twist.

All right, everybody, I just want to tell you about a little something we're doing here or testing at this week in startups. If you go to our Twitter page, Twitter.com slash TWI Startups, you will see, and we can zoom in on this, perhaps, right under our bio and how many followers we have. And, oh, wow, look, we have 43,000 followers on the account. You're going to see a little box that says newsletter. It says that this week in Startups Newsletter, one subscriber, we just put it up. Go ahead and click subscribe on that and show us some love, subscribe. and we'll start sending little updates out. That's part of a product called review

that the fine folks at Twitter bought as part of their process of making Twitter into a fuller product. It's like a substack competitor. Review actually, I think existed before substack. I think substack copied review. Now I also have it on Twitter.com slash Jason. I'm thinking about maybe writing a little bit more

and sharing some stuff with you. So just a little thing you can check out there. Additionally, another little mini promotion here, but not really promotion as much as a gift for everybody there. If you go to inside.com. If you don't know, I am the CEO of inside.com. It is a data service for executives. Go to inside.com slash events and you will see some upcoming events we have. I basically decided that for Inside and I wonder what you all think about this on the podcast

and those of you watching live, what you think of my idea for a business. and if you would pay $25 a month for this, we have, I think, eight or nine analysts now at inside, as well as maybe 10 freelancers. And what I'm asking them to do is, I took away half their workload. So they were writing a newsletter in the morning,

a newsletter in the afternoon. I said, from now on, everybody does half as much work. And they're like, awesome, half as much work. We can work a half day and then go home and make the same salary. It's like, not quite. I want you to write your newsletter in the morning. And in the afternoon, I want you to do events.

An event can be a tier one, tier two, tier three event. A tier three event is you interviewing somebody one-on-one. A tier two event is, you know, maybe a two to three-hour event with two, three, four speakers. And a tier one event would be like launch festival, the scale conference I do, which we haven't done over COVID, and things like Meet Our Fund, which was our two-day event where you got to get pitched as a founder by 50 venture capitalists. Well, my idea here is to have the writers write in the afternoon and then work on events that you can attend. And then we're going to make it $25 bucks a month to be in our Slack channel with the analysts and to come to all the events. But for now, for the next couple of

months, I'm just making all the events for free. The next event is one I thought would be really interesting because I'm looking at this as an investment space. It's called the Business of Psychedelics and one of our analysts, Anthony, who's really good, young guy who we found and who's been doing a great job for us, was passionate about this topic. So on Wednesday, September 15th, at 11 a.m. Pacific time, you can come to this event. It's a virtual event. And my concept is I'll make it free. We'll give you a free subscription to Inside for a couple of months.

And then if you like it and you don't have to put your credit card in or anything like that, but we'll probably try to upsell you on $25 bucks a month to come to unlimited events with us. So here is the page. And then you see the first one there, the business of psychedelics. That's inside.com slash events. Go ahead and click the first business of psychedelics event. And it's just like you put your first name and your email in and you've saved your seat. We have somebody from Neo-Kuma, Third Wave, Leafy Tunnel, Tablo Rosa Ventures.

So we have the people who are investing in this stuff, and psychedelics are going to become, I believe, a new wave of how we deal with mental illness, PTSD. It's fairly obvious MDMA, psilocybin, and some of these naturally occurring or substances that we've discovered could actually have some positive effects in people in the right context. So I would like to also cover some psychedelics here on the program. So note, if you have any interesting psychedelic CEOs who are making a business out of this, I would like to meet them. Just DM the TWA Startups account on Twitter. Great way to talk to our producers. Or I do the live stream here at 10 a.m.s every day of the week, you know, most weeks.

Sometimes I'm running a little bit behind to get on at 1015 like today. And you can also talk to us at this week in startups.com slash slack. We have a Slack channel where you can talk to the producers. but it's just for talking about the show and startups. It's not for promotion. So if you join us there, this week in startups.com. Okay, let's get on to the news. A foil wrap home has survived the Caldor fire.

I have been talking about this idea for a couple of years. I said to myself, my brother's a firefighter. I know that they wear outfits that protect them when they go into fires. And then I said, what if that outfit they wear, that's fire resistant, you've seen them in that. what if they took that fire-resistant outfit and just wrapped it around a house? What would happen? And I thought to myself, well, those outfits are very expensive, right? I think they cost hundreds of dollars.

Let's just say they cost $1,000 for a human. Well, a house is a lot bigger than a human. It would be like a hundred times bigger, right? Well, a hundred times $1,000 is $100,000. Well, if the house costs a million, a hundred thousand dollar blanket maybe doesn't make sense. But if the house costs $5 million, which is what a lot of these houses cost in, you know, these elite communities in California in Malibu and, you know, and in Lake Tahoe, you know, maybe a $100,000 blanket on the top of your house is just what the doctor ordered.

And it's really hard to get insurance, as we talked about on the All-In podcast, for some of these fire zones now. And so I looked online and I found a professor, Takahashi. I heard him talking about this. He had the same idea, but I don't think he ever executed on it. So he's a Case Western Reserve Engineer Professor, Fu Mi, Miyaki, Takahashi. He's been working on this problem for the last decade.

I had actually found a video on YouTube. Maybe we can find that ourselves here. The experiments he's done reveal that two-layer blankets with an aluminum surface can block up to 92% of the convective heat and 96% of the radiation from a fire. And he just told us to the San Francisco Chronicle, who has recently come to the party. Here's his quote, it is effective for protecting structures for a short period while the wildfire front pass five to ten minutes, but longer protection

would be needed to prevent structure to structure ignition, which I think is the key issue in these wildfires. If a home goes up, man, that is just like, you know,

a giant amount of heat that will then jump from house to house to house. So in fact, if you wrap these, it would act as a blocker maybe in a series of houses in a row.

So according to the article in the chronicle, the blankets help in three ways. One, preventing fire, brands or large burning embers from entering the building through the gutters, eves, vents, broken windows, and roofs.

Okay, that makes sense, right? These big embers, which I guess are called fire brands. I never heard that term. Number two, by keeping homes from making direct contact with flames, duh. That's a great thing to not happen. And three, by reflecting thermal radiation from large fires burning nearby over a sustained period, possibly protecting

the house from bursting into flames from intense heat, which is like, you know, something I assumed. All this heat around it at some point will just make it go up. And so, somebody actually wrapped their houses, there is a company called Firesat, and I want to meet this company in San Diego, so if somebody can ask them to reach out to J-Cal,

they just make this blanket that they tell people to wrap around the house. I think there's better ways to do this, like maybe drop it from a helicopter, or have it rolled up on the roof of the house, and then there's a remote control you can press, and it just, you know, flares out. I know that most houses are unique. What if there was

a way for it to just explode like a airbag and just drape over? There's a couple of different concepts here. These are a combination of aluminum on the outside with fiberglass threads on the inside and laminated together. One reusable role of fire as that's material can cover 1,500 square feet,

about 140 square meters, and cost close to $900, according to Reuters. So this needs some kind of iteration as a product, but when you look at that house in this YouTube video here, which we'll put a link to in the show notes, my God, what a common sense solution and I am fascinated with materials.

So I think I want to start investing in companies with materials and I want to incubate companies because there's so many companies getting so big and I've got a bunch of cash sitting over here from my funds and from my syndicate. And the syndicate.com is my angel investing club with 9,000 accredited investors in it. I think they would have an appetite to give $500,000 to a group of qualified people who wanted to pursue some material science, you know, basic testing of this. and, you know, what would that look like? I guess building a prototype, putting it over a house,

and then seeing if the house goes on fire or not, and then raising money based on that. So if there's somebody out there who wants to create a company, maybe using Fire Zatz, aluminum, and then, you know, building the system around it and the software around it, or the business model around it, I'm up for it. Ping me.

You all know Jason on Twitter, but I'm not looking for somebody who's just passionate about the idea. I would like somebody with a material science background, somebody who's got credibility. Obviously, a firefighter is, great, but I really think this is about material science. So I want to get closer to scientists who want to start companies. I'm super excited about this concept because I think there's going to be a ton of business opportunities around what's happening with climate change. And those business

opportunities, I think, are a really important thing for entrepreneurs to go after because we are going to have to fight climate change or extreme weather is probably the better term to make it less charged for people. Extreme weather is real. We can debate climate change, and I'm really exhausted from that debate, but we cannot debate extreme weather. So let's just talk about making products

that help in extreme weather conditions. What are the extreme weather conditions? We know these extreme heat, extreme dryness, fires, flooding, et cetera. If anybody has any other ideas, let's talk about it as a group, because I'm looking to invest in this. So that's our first little story there,

and it's a call for me to any entrepreneurs out there who want to pursue this. And if you have any other ideas, let me know. All around the world, tech companies are innovating and driving returns for investors. Our crowd analyzes companies across the global private market, selecting those with the greatest growth potential that brings them to you, from personalized medicine to cybersecurity to robotics, quantum computing, and more. In state-of-the-art labs, startup garages, and anywhere in between, Our Crowd is identifying innovators so you can invest when growth potential is greatest, which is early.

Our Crowds accredited investors have already invested over $1 billion in growing tech companies, and many of their members have benefited from the 46 IPOs or exits of their investments. Now you can truly diversify your portfolio by investing early in innovative private market companies at Our Crowd. Join the fastest growing venture capital investment community at our crowd.com's slash twist. Once again, our crowd.com slash twist. Oh, you are CROWD.com slash twist. Notion has acquired automate.io. It's a Zapier competitor. According to TechCrunch, Notion, which is a product I love, and they actually advertise on this podcast, has acquired this company automate.io. The TechCrunch article states automate I-O builds connectivity

and integrations with over 200 services as the workplace productivity startup looks to accelerate its product expansion to become more compelling, yada, yada. A Notion user admin, this is the with Automate, a notion user admin can connect the collaborative platform to Slack, Gmail, MailChimp, Salesforce, Google Workspace Office, yada, yada, yada, yada. And I think Zapier and if this and that are the two leaders in this space, Zapier seems

by far to be the best no-code solution. And there is a new job position in the world, business automation executive. I just made that title up, but there seems to be somebody in every organization I'm working with who knows how to master Zapier, which makes you much happier. That's what I used to say in the ad reads. They advertise like three or four years ago. Zapier is like some person in your organization masters using it and everything in your organization

that is repetitive becomes automated. And I really think like I have every organization is using notion to be a right first community, a right first culture is what I would say. So I tell everybody now, whether it's inside at launch or at my house, like make a notion page, right? So literally, we're having problems with our pool. I made a notion page. I put all the information about the pool, hardware, and like the pump and what's not working and who the vendors are and I link out to stuff. And then you have this like wiki for your house.

You have a wiki for work. And I tell everybody, listen, if we're going to have a meeting, put the agenda and all the notes in a notion page so that we can work on this. So congratulations to Notion on. this acquisition. It makes a lot of sense. And Notion just made their API accessible earlier this summer. And my associate press here at this week in startups and launch was in the beta and he's got a couple of things done for us there. So it's pretty cool. Congratulations to them. I think it's a savvy acquisition. Okay. Next story, Facebook is coming out with smart

glasses. Facebook is collaborating with Rayban, the sunglasses I like to wear, my aviators. Perils and Raybans are the two that look good on my face, I think. That's my My wife tells me. So they are going to create a pair of smart glasses. You may have seen Zuck the last couple of days showing himself playing ping pong, going, I guess wakeboarding maybe, and then fencing with his daughter very cute. So you see Zuck playing ping pong here. And it's a little bit motion sicknessy, but it seems to have some stability in it, I guess,

because it's not that bad. And I get motion sickness. I'm watching this video along with you. If you're not watching the video and you listen to the podcast, you can always go to YouTube.com slash this weekend to watch the video. And so, you know, this will allow for a lot of AR. So some other people were talking about these online as well. But this is once again, Zuckerberg obsessed with the product manager for Facebook,

Evan Spiegel. You may know Evan Spiegel as being the CEO and founder of Snapchat. On the side, he is Zuck's product manager and he works in his lab for new things. No, seriously, Zuck, do you literally have to be? to steal every single thing Evan Spiegel does. It is so sad for you. Snapchat had their spectacles. I kid you not, back in 2016. And if you start thinking about all the things that Zuckerberg has ripped off competitors, it is unbelievable that he has absolutely no original ideas of his own. It's absolutely gross. And if you just think about Evan Spiegel and his

innovations, Evan came up with stories, ephemeral messaging, and filters, or what do they call lenses, right? And Zuckerberg copied all those, and now Zuckerberg's copying the glasses, too. It's just really sad. I mean, let me ask the question here for the people who are watching live. Is there anything that you can remember that Zuckerberg did that was original? That wasn't just a blatant rip-off of somebody else? You know, ephemeral messaging he stole. He just copies everything. And it's just kind of sad as an entrepreneur. Doesn't mean you're not going to win. So I think that's an important lesson for people who listen to this week's immature poets copy mature poets steal so that's a

famous quote that a lot of people have stolen. I get it, but it's just kind of gross and unseemly and it would just be better if he put some kind of original spin on something. The like button, people think that the like button was his innovation. It was not. Kevin Rose came up with the dig button long before, long before Zuckerberg. And Zucker

wanted to buy dig at some point, and Zuckerberg stole it from Kevin Rose. Kevin Rose, arguably, and he admits this, was inspired by two sites that came before Dig, FAR, and, um, oh, Slashdown, of course. And they really were the ones who had like upvoting and moving stuff up based on people's interest in it. So that's an example of people iterating on each other and building something up. By the way, side note, I heard Kevin Rose wanted to do something interesting with Dig, and I know buy sell ads and my guy, over there owns dig.com. He bought a couple of like brands that failed basically dig,

Pando, a couple of other ones. And then he tried to breed some new life into them, which is cool. It's just Todd. I would do a partnership with Kevin Rose and just keep 50% of dig or 25% of dig and let him earn it back. What amazing thing you would do for web history

if Kevin Rose could have dig back. It's just, it's a no-brainer. I mean, you're so busy. Todd had buy sell ads like, and think if Kevin Rose with his following started dig again. How many people would go crazy for that? Okay, next story, Sutherby's Board Ape auction closed today at $24 million. That is absolutely bonkers. And I think historic, not only for the club, but I think NFTs in general. The only NFT I think that's sold for more

than this was obviously Metcovin bought for 69 million. People had put together an NFT back in the day for 69. Every days was the name of that one. So this is more than $230,000 per ape. We reached out to Yuga Labs. I guess we're going to try to get them on here. You know, if you own a board ape or you own these NFTs and they're going crazy like this, just if it's more than 50% of your net worth or if it's, God forbid, 80 or 90% of your net worth and you hit one of these giant home runs, please just take some idiot insurance on it. Like sell 25% of it and put a down payment on an apartment or something. for yourself or put something into your 401k or your Roth IRA so you have something for later

in life because I don't think these NFTs are going to be worth what they're worth now in all likelihood because I think there's going to be many other ones and I'm just not sure that this is commensurate with reality. Hey everybody, Harry Hurst. Yes, the co-CEO and co-founder of pipe.com is with us and he's going to explain to you how pipe.com works and what a great innovation. and it is for startups, many of my startups are using it. Harry, welcome to the show. Thank you, Jason.

So tell us what is Pipe, and for people don't know, it's Pipe.com. Great domain. Pipes are trading platform, and we allow companies to turn their recurring revenue streams into upfront capital, and they do that by trading those recurring revenue streams with institutional investors that are on the other side of our marketplace, and they're looking to purchase the annual value of those subscription revenues. So companies can reinvest that capital into growth, or whatever. initiative they'd like without having to take on dilution.

And you've probably seen we've been called the NASDAQ for revenue. All right. Thanks again, Harry. And with Pipe, there's no debt, no loans and no dilution, which is really important to me as an investor. Pipe and Harry are so confident you're going to love trading your recurring revenues that if you sign up at Pipe.com slash twist today, they'll eliminate all your trading fees for one full year. What a generous offer.

This could save you tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the size of your business and the volume you trade. Sign up today at Pipe.com slash twist. Happy Piping, everybody. All right, next story, Amazon is expanding its educational benefits to include a bachelor's degree program, according to the Wall Street Journal. Amazon is offering a new education benefit to its employees that have worked for at least 90 days. The educational benefit could be a way to retain more hourly workers as Amazon has hired 400,000 employees during the pandemic alone and is looking to hire more in the coming months, according to the Wall Street Journal. The article mentions that benefits include up-front payments for a bachelor's or associate degrees, high school diploma program,

GEDs, English as a second language certificates. So the devil's in the details on these. So let's see if we can get into those. Workers must continue to work for Amazon part or full time while taking classes. But part-time staffers will receive 50% of the college costs, according to the Wall Street Journal. Is there a cap on that? Can they go to Harvard and pay $75,000 to you? There must be a cap.

The Wall Street Journal notes that previously Amazon had covered, quote, 90% of the cost of an associate degree or other certification program and didn't offer a four-year college degree. So this is an expansion. Robert Kelchin, a professor and head of the Department of Education Leadership and Policy Studies at Knoxville, tweeted about the potential eligible colleges for the program. It would be very interesting to see which colleges become approved partners. The size of Amazon makes this something to watch. So this is incredible, and I think this speaks to the fact that the free market works. And what do I mean by the free market works?

A lot of people have been doing some hand-wringing about gig workers, hourly workers. Well, when you have a free market and it's booming and it's thriving, what happens? Eventually, because America is building products and services that reach the rest of the globe, we need more workers. And we are not letting as many people into the country. So this is creating a labor shortage. Obviously, there's a labor shortage as well because people got stimulus money. there's another issue.

People got rich off NFTs. I don't think that's actually a really big one. I think some people have reconsidered their life choices. And one of those is maybe to live a more modest low-cost lifestyle and maybe not need to make as much money, which then I think drives more people to the gig economy because they want to kind of shape how often they work. I wonder if people who are watching live,

how many of them are rethinking their career choices and how much free time they spend, right, because of COVID. And then people are retiring earlier. So because a lot of nurses, teachers, etc., are just saying, you know what? I was going to retire in five years, the pandemic. I might as well just call it quits now and start enjoying my life. I have friends who died from COVID. I had to put my life on hold for a year and didn't go out of the house.

I want a yolo. So I'm just to retire early. All of those things have led to an environment where I think there's upwards of 10 million available jobs. This has led to, as you know, Amazon put their base wage at 15, which was double the federal minimum wage. and then you have all the ride-chairing and delivery companies battling it out, and then you can't get retail workers.

And then a lot of restaurants and cafes are shutting down now. A lot of them are shutting down because, not because they don't have customers. The customers are coming back, but they can't find employees. So the free market is at work, and I think we're seeing what I think is a kind of great moment in time where labor, individuals, will be able to command more for their work product or lower their burn rate and not need as much money. That's the ultimate way to have power in this dynamic with your employer. If you don't need to work, if you're a trust fund kid and your parents gave you a $10 million trust fund,

if you don't like what you do at work, you literally get up, tell the boss to go pound salt and make you a ham sandwich and you leave. But not everybody can do that. I certainly couldn't do it. I couldn't just leave. I had to think early in my career about where I would go. Well, as the gigama economy has emerged, there are people who know, if I quit this job, I can go drive for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Postmates, get a job at Amazon, whatever, get a $500 bonus, a $1,000 bonus for taking the job, and I have a safety net.

And if I've lowered my burn rate, well, if I'm living, you know, at a lower cost outside of a major city, and I'm not commuting anymore, and the community was costing me 300 a month, and I was losing 60 hours a month, while I can gain those 60 hours back. It's really interesting, I think, what's happened, and I think it's good for society. I think we're seeing a lot of people

having more agency over their lives and their careers. That's what the free market has done. All of those additional jobs that were created in the gig economy, I know that the unions don't like it, and I know that people don't get benefits. But all of the gig economy companies got together and said, let's have a third way of doing this. You have full-time employment

where we tell you what shift you work and you have no choice and you wear the logo target or whatever and you have to have your hair cut a certain length, yada, yada, they control how you behave at work. You have no agency. You show up for your 6 a.m. shift. You work till 4 p.m. No choice. You take a half hour of lunch when we tell you. Well, that's not what the gig economy provides. The gig economy is I turn on my app and I work. And if I work on Friday and Saturdays and make more money and that's my hack and then I take my weekend on Monday and Tuesday and I make 50% more on the weekend so I can take three days off and spend more time with my kids. That's the type of thing we want everybody thinking about. We want everybody looking at their lives as if they're

the CEO of their own life. Then you have agency. What the unions are doing is they want to collect dues, they want to gain power, and they want to force employees who have agency to then listen to them and be part of their tribe. And that kind of sucks. I'll be totally honest. I'm not saying employees shouldn't have power, but I think the true power comes from them being able to make their choices in life and to move from one employer to the other. So once you become a shift worker, you lose all your power, right? I mean, we can all agree on that. When you're a shift worker and you're dependent on one person for your revenue, you have lost all your power and all of your agency. And 70, 80% of the drivers at Postmates and DoorDash and Instagram, yeah,

everybody wants to make more money, but none of them want to work shift work. So I really think these unions are pushing for something that makes people into children who don't have agency over their lives. And I think the gig economy and this vibrant competition where Amazon is paying for people's school, the driver companies are giving huge bonuses, I think that's rating a really vibrant market and we should bet on them. We should bet on them. Not shift work. Shift work is for suckers. That's my belief. I believe that is the raw deal because once they get you into that shift work and you got that manager grinding you down and telling you when you have to work and then you can't see your kids and you don't get to set your schedule, take two weeks off, you know,

it's just it's bad. That's my personal feeling. I wonder how you feel in the comments. Health insurance is a really interesting part of this. And this is why I think all of the country now, the right and the left need to get together on that one issue. Let's give a basic health safety net to everybody and take health care out of the realm of employment. That is a dysfunctional part of our society. Make health care just like public education. If your bank charges outrageous fees, you need a bank account that's built for small business. and that bank account is Novo's free business banking.

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invoicing. Plus, you can tag each transaction and upload your receipts and keep everything nice and tidy so that when you go into due diligence as a startup or you have a board meeting, everything's tight and tight is right when it comes to your books. Don't screw up your future funding rounds by not having good books. Novo integrates with most leading business tools and services like Stripe, Shopify, QuickBooks, and more, and they do that all for free. Plus, Novo offers over $5,000 in perks and discounts just for signing up.

So, get your free business banking account in just 10 minutes at banknovo.com slash twist. Go to bank, n-O-v-o.com slash twist to sign up for free right now and get a free copy of Novo Small Business Starter Guide. Once again, banknovo.com slash twist. Okay, Evergrand is China's second largest reet. That stands for Real Estate Investment Trust, I believe, by revenue, and it's highly levered, and its stock is falling. So here's a little background. This is a quote from Asia markets.

China Evergrand cranes dominate the skylines of many Chinese cities. The company develops and manages real estate across China, primarily focusing on residential apartment complexes. According to the company website, Evergrand Real Estate owns more than 1,300 projects in over 286. cities. Wow, think of the scale of that. And so Reuters reports, property developer China Evergrand Group plans to suspend interest payments due to loans to two banks on September 21st, financial intelligence provider, REDD reported on Wednesday citing four sources briefed by bankers. Stopping payments. Hmm. Bloomberg reports. Shares briefly fell below their 2009 initial public offering price after a second credit rating downgrade in as many days boosted concerns.

the developer will default on its debt. These most recent credit rating downgrades came from Fitch ratings, one of the big three credit rating agencies, SNP Global Ratings, and Moody's have also made similar downgrade. Fitch's current rating for Evergrade is CC, default imminent. Oh, wow, that is an ugly looking chart. Zoom in on that chart. Oh, my Lord, that is gross.

You do not want to be in that stock. Ouch. You know, debt is really dangerous. interest for equity holders. Just to stop for a minute and just explain debt versus equity. You buy a share in a company. So let's say the company has a, you know, for the argument's sake, had a thousand shares and you have 10 and you own 1% of the company. Great. You own 1% of the company. Companies, you know, making a million dollars a year. You own 1% of it. You're getting a $10,000 dividend. All is great. Now the company's like, wow, we're doing so great. We make a million dollars a year. Let's take out a

$10 million alone to build a factory to do whatever. And then it doesn't work out. And then their interest payments are going up. They have to pay back the principal. You have all done this maybe on a mortgage or a car payment. And they can't keep up with those payments. Well, then that company gets taken over by the creditors who gave them loans. You know who comes after the creditors? The equity can get wiped out. That means it goes to zero. Super dangerous. This is why I tell startups, do not take venture debt. Do not do debt instruments early in your life. If you have like a million dollar credit line because you have $10 million in revenue and you're profitable and you've got $20 million in the bank. Yeah, that's different. But I sometimes see companies that are raising $1.5 million

try to put $500,000 in venture debt on it or some kind of debt device. And I'm like, well, why don't we just make it work with $1.5 million? Like build a business plan that works with a million to a million five as opposed to trying to put this $500,000 on top of it because then the next investor comes and the next investor looks at all that debt and says, I'm not buying that. And that's what we're seeing here. Who would buy this stock now? Who's going to buy the stock if it has all these problems with debt? You're going to stay away for a minute because you have other opportunities to invest. So if you look here at the Moody's ratings, you know, you have AAA Prime and then it has high grade and then upper medium grade and then you get into that

junk, which looks like it's B-A-1, B-A-2. I'm not familiar with all of this. But when you get to sees, it does not look good. It's beyond highly speculative. Now, here is the rub. You will find people tweeting about these two topics together. If you remember, we talked about Tether on this podcast many times and how Tether was no longer backed by dollars. They said they were back at one to one. It's a stable coin. You buy this cryptocurrency, USDT, and it's backed by $1 in a bank account. And then they said, oh yeah, you know what? That's not true anymore. Like, I think they had 3% cash equivalence or something, and then they had this idea of commercial paper. What is commercial paper?

It's loans to companies like Evergrand. Now, we don't know who Tether was investing in, but people started asking them, savvy people, maybe people who had inside information, do they have any commercial paper in China? And the really, I would say, smarmy, just less than reputable team, over a tether might be a way of saying it that would be generous. These folks are really weird people, and they seem to have a problem just saying what's the truth. They seem to be truth challenged.

Probably not a great idea to have a truth challenged group of people and honesty, transparency. They're transparency challenge. That's a great word. So you have the transparency challenge tether executives who won't tell you who the commercial paper is with. and other people do report their commercial papers with and the commercial paper

people are speculating is outside of the U.S. And they're speculating it's in China and in fact, if we zoom in on this tweet maybe we can zoom in on that a little bit and I can read that tweet and here it is from BitFinex I'll just read a series of tweets here

and this is from September 6th Tether refuses to deny holding ever grand paper when people said they could be holding commercial commercial paper issued by exchanges they denied it. They're also likely holding it through a shell account proxy because what they're doing is illegal in China. Oh, that's interesting. Duck 14,1 says, I'm absolutely convinced that Evergrade paper makes up, not insignificant portion

of Tether's backing. We should find out soonish. Last be standing, Evergrade update, this time with Tether. Boy, oh boy, have things gotten interesting caveat up front. This is a theory. That has begun circulating in bits and pieces below. I've tried to summarize the argument evidence, but it's definitely worth reading. So there's a series, that was from July 22nd. So there's a series of people speculating this. Again, pure speculation, right? I'm not saying that this is accurate. I'm saying this is speculation. Now, when you see anonymous accounts speculating on Twitter, it could be fud, fear or uncertainty and doubt, designed to drive a stock price down. We saw that with the Tesla Q people. They were like, remember they were taking

like pictures of model 3s, like, with dust on them in parking lots. And, but then you would see model 3s and model Y is everywhere on the road. And they're like, oh, my God, they're Tesla is like putting Teslas in, you know, garages because they can't sell them. And then everybody you know who ordered a Tesla was complaining that their Tesla was back ordered and they had to wait three months. And you're trying to figure out the FUD where Teslas are all over and you see them driving with your own eyes and you see this picture of 18 Teslas in a garage and you're like,

hmm. And wonder what's going on here? Well, there are people from anonymous accounts spreading fear uncertainty and down. And sometimes people use anonymous accounts because maybe they're insiners, or maybe they have an axe to grind because they're a previous insider. They got screwed by the company, or they're just one of those unique people who pursues fraud for the justification of doing it or they've taken a short position against it. Anyway, we don't know here who BitFinext is. We had BitFinext on the program, obviously. It was the first and only time we've had an anonymous person, but I thought it was.

was worthy since they had become such a interesting account that was being talked about. So sometimes we'll talk about things here that have to do with anonymous accounts or fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and these kind of things, speculation. But you notice how I always tell you that right up front, and I'm very clear. That's because when I was a journalist, we were clear about these things. We tried to inform you as much as possible. I'm not trying to manipulate you the audience. I'm trying to figure things out together to be candid and try to explain things to you.

as best as I understand them so that you can then help me understand them better. You saw me do that on yesterday's show when I was talking about these folks loaning out their cryptocurrency. And we learned a lot. Institutional owners buying cryptocurrency, okay. And they have their Bitcoin is collateral. So if the Bitcoin goes from 50 to 25, they get liquidated, that pays down their debt, yada, yada, and they, K.

They know their customer. Interesting. So this will be something very interesting to watch. Tether is maybe they're under investigation for wire fraud from previous banking shenanigans that they kind of admitted to, like using bank accounts that were not meant for money transfer, using for money transfer. So it's going to be very interesting to see how this all plays out. What a great show.

Thanks for all the comments. Now it's time for me to answer your questions. And I asked everybody today to really think about me as a friend. I think that's my superpower in life. That's what my friends tell me. is that I'm like the best friend to them and that makes me feel great. I always try to be as a general rule, the best friend I can be to my friends. I just think about them.

And I think like what are they struggling with? Sometimes I'll call a friend and I'll just say, hey, haven't talked to you in a while. I'm just calling to check in on you. How are you doing? I say, I'm great. And I say, how you're really doing? What's going on? Tell me about how your kids are.

Tell me about how it's going with your wife or spouse. How's business, you know? And so let's do that here on the podcast. You're my friends. You listen to the podcast. We've been together doing this for over 10. 10 years with many of the people in the audience. And we're doing this live, and I love interacting with you.

It's giving me a lot of energy. So I'm going to take some questions here, and I want you to just tell me candidly. You can use your initials or say, make this anonymous. So when I talk, if this makes it to the podcast, not just the live stream, we can not take your name out. Okay. So we have Richard from YouTube. If you don't necessarily need the funding to continue building, iterating on your

MVP and can bootstrap from your own funds is joining an example. accelerator worth giving up that 6 to 7%. Absolutely interesting question. So you really do want to bootstrap for as long as possible because you're learning all that time without starting the clock of venture capital and jet fuel. What do I mean by them? Well, venture investors, angel investors, they want to get a return on their capital. And once you start down that path, you have to because you've decided to have a partnership with investors and you took their money and you issued them shares in your company, you've now changed the dynamic. What you're working on as a project, you have to think about that partner and how you

and your behavior is impacting them. In other words, you have to be a fiduciary for all the stakeholders and shareholders in your company. Stakeholders means people who don't necessarily own shares, your employees, maybe in some cases, your partners, the community that you build the product for. you get the idea. Just people you impact in general, your supply chain would come to mind. But for shareholders, you really do have a serious fiduciary responsibility.

So if you want to change the product, if you want to fire your customers, if you want to make your product, which is, you know, you're charging $1,000 a month to 10 people, and you want to make it for free and you want to put off making money for a year, you know, if you have investors, you're going to have to explain that to them. You're going to send them a monthly update or a quarterly update. You're just on this fast track. So yes, if you can keep doing your MVP, and learning and making progress,

if you can do that indefinitely and own 100% of your company, never take money from investors. And that has happened in the world a handful of times. And I've seen what we call a Pegasus internally at our firm launch, which is launch.co, our website.

We probably should update that at some point. I'm thinking not just making it in a notion page and we just put copy up there in text. Launch looks for Pegasuses, which is companies that can skip around a financing or two. So every time you do a financing, it's between 10 and 25% dilution. Let's just put that number at 15.

You do that five times. You get an idea of what happens to your holdings. They go down significantly. So we saw withcom, they raised money in the first round when we put in 378,000, I believe. Sometimes you don't forget those numbers when it's a big win. Put $378,000 when it was a $5 million company or so. Then they let some friends in to invest at $20, and then the next round of funding was at $250. the next round after that was $1.2 billion

and then I think after that it was multiple billions. So when you look at that trajectory, they skipped multiple rounds of financing, which means the founders own a lot more of the company and my original 6% or 7% my 6% ownership or whatever was didn't get diluted all that much.

So I still own 4% or 5% of that company. It's amazing. So you really do want to not do that. Now, in terms of going to an accelerator, accelerators are great. If you go to the top three or four, launch Acceler, the one I run, why Combinare and TechStarts? Why those top

three? Because those top three signal two investors, downstream investors, seed funds, etc., venture worthiness. You've passed the screening of David Cohen, Jason Callicanus, or Paul Graham, essentially. Paul Graham, I think, is not doing the screening now. I do the screening in a cursory way. My team meets all the companies and they say yes or no,

or these are the ones we want to accept. I ask some probing questions, and then we accept them, and then I come to a third of maybe the accelerator, glasses now. And then you have, you know, tech stars around the world. So is it worth it? It is worth it if you want to have that stamp in your passport and you want to meet,

in our case, a thousand investors and you have that halo. A third-time founder, you know, if you're Mark Pinkus or Evan Williams or Travis, Kalanick, like what value would have provided none, right? You already can raise those rounds. So it's really for people who are getting started in the business. Not as early young, but people are getting started in the business and maybe don't have all the connections. Okay, that was a great question.

Dusty asked me on YouTube, how can someone deal with disappointment of not getting chances to pitch an idea if you're a nobody? Just keep pushing forward. You know, Dusty, I really like this question because I was a nobody and I felt like a nobody

for a large portion of my career. And what I realized was, the more I created in the world, the more I went from being a nobody to people following me. There are people with ideas and people who talk and then there are people who create.

And once I created Silicon Islander Reporter, and it was just a single thing, 16-page photocopy. My phone, my lunch schedule filled up. I had made something in the world, and I got addicted to it. When I handed them a 16-page photocopy, and they read it, and it was good, and it was interesting, and it was 1996, and they were reading about tech companies in New York in this place called Silicon Alley, and there were two dozen tech companies there, Razor Fish, and Voyager-making CD-ROMs and Prodigy. They were like, wow, this is exciting. And so who made this magazine. I didn't. How did you make the news letter? I was like, well, I went to a photocopy store.

I wrote the stories. I shot pictures on my 35 millimeter and I did page maker to print it out with Brian Alvin. And they were like, wow, that's incredible. You made this? They couldn't believe it. So don't worry about people pitching people your ideas. Worry about your skills and what you create because there's so many people in the world and they're all so busy that what we're all looking at is we're looking at the landscape and we're saying, who's made something interesting? Right? And so I listened to this podcast called Red Scare.

There's two women in New York. They are part of what's called the Dirtbag Left. And I like it because they're super candid. They're somewhat intellectual. They're a little edgy. They're inappropriate. It's like a little Howard sterny kind of, but intellectual.

And it reminds me of New York and the people I used to hang out with when I was younger living in New York. and I noticed that having listened to them for like two years or so and I catch probably every other episode and I was subscribed to them on Patreon for a while because I wanted to support them. They, I just watched their careers

because I also follow them on social media and the woman Dasha who is one of the two I've watched her getting acting jobs and making her own films and documentaries and it's like she made a podcast which has no production, quality. I mean, it is like they're, they're fumbling with the recorder. The sound is terrible, but they're funny and they're interesting and they read books and they read articles and they have a

hot take on things. And it's, you know, they're entertaining. Just by doing 100 episodes of their podcast, I've watched Josh's career. And I think you'll see her on Secession this year, or one of those. It was either Secession or Billions. One of those two shows she's going to be on. I don't think, you know, Secession, I think because Billions started already. And oh, and by the way, now they're making $46,000 a month. So they're making $20,000. each doing a podcast. And you're either creating or you're waiting. You're creating or you're waiting. And what I like about the Red Scare story is not only are they making all this money from their podcast, which is, you know, all it took was a recorder and two people with an opinion.

They're now all their other parts of their careers are also booming. What if my ideas are too to make on my own? Then do I work on how polish the pitch or the visuals for the concepts are Dusty Green again on YouTube? Follow up question. So Dusty, I think what you want to do iterate. I wanted to start a cable channel and be a media mogul in my earlier years, but I started a 16-page photocopy because that was the best I could afford. So I think what you have to do is maybe look yourself in the mirror and say, what's something I can do today at a very high quality level that proves to the world I'm capable of doing something? And that is a stepping stone towards the bigger picture. In the example with Red Scare, maybe Dasha wanted to make a movie

but didn't have the money. Well, then she starts making $20K a month from doing this podcast and has an audience who will now buy the first 10,000 tickets to her independent film, right? And because people listen to the podcast and they know she can promote it, well, then maybe the other co-host can get a book deal. You get the idea. So what you're doing in life is you're iterating and you're proving to the world that you're a creator, not a waiter. And I don't mean a waiter serving drinks or food.

I mean a waiter or somebody sitting around waiting. So you right now feel like a waiter, dusty. and you feel like candidly you're making excuses. I'm giving you permission to forget about the giant big picture for a minute. You can still keep it up there. It's not going anywhere. Put it on your wall.

I'm going to own some giant media company just like I wanted to. Okay, but what can you do today? What's your 16-page photocopy newsletter? What's your Redscarab podcast with $100 in donations on Patreon that grows to 46,000, right? That's what I would challenge you to think about.

Oh, here we go. This is a great personal problem from Ruffle Duck. My problem is laziness. How do I get myself to work in my projects? Like my life depends on it. Well, I wonder if Ruffled Duck has like a trust fund or something. And, you know, does it need to fight to survive in the world?

That is a great question. If you're lazy, it's probably, there might be a root cause to it, like in your childhood or something. There could be like a psychological reason of why you're lazy. Or it could just be habit. And I think if you were to talk to a therapist or a coach, they might take different approaches towards this. A therapist might be like, oh, tell me about your childhood. What about it is the reason?

And then, you know, if you're talking to a behavioral psychologist or somebody who does cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, I was a psychology major, so I know a lot of this stuff, and I've thought about it a lot working with entrepreneurs. You might just have bad habits, right? And so redoing your habits, just to set some goals for your, Every day I'm going to do X, Y, and Z and really get yourself into a routine where you just do a little bit of performance each day and find some meaningfulness in what you do. Those are two different approaches. I, if I was you, I would maybe look at both of those. Maybe you have some fear from your childhood or maybe people told you weren't good enough, which is what people told me. Now, if people tell you you're not good enough, that can go one or two ways. You could actually believe it or you can use it as fire to say, I will prove you wrong. Right? Like, They say, J-Cal, you're never going to be anything. You're just a kid from Brooklyn.

You got a 71, three-year average at Severin High School. You're going to become a cop. And I said, well, no, I'm going to go to Fordham, and I'll just go at night. It will take me five years. And, you know, I'll try to make it work by being a waiter and fixing laser printers. I took that lack of belief people had. And I said, you know what? Instead of internalizing it and saying, I'm not, you know, good enough or whatever, or they're right.

I said, I'll prove them wrong. So I think that's where therapy and talking to somebody who's a therapist in a professional setting and saying, listen, I have, I'm lazy. Why am I lazy? And then the other approach is to talk to a coach about it and find a coaching service. And I think if you are motivated to do either or both of those, you might have a breakthrough. And then a very simple thing, I think, is habits. And, you know, everybody has laziness in different places. You know, I was lazy about my health habits and, you know, now that I've got the wealth checked off and I've got happiness checked off, I'm really trying to hold myself accountable on the weight front. I'm down from 213 down. Today I was 192.

So I'm 21 pounds off the peak and I'm going to be in the 180s soon. So I feel sometimes I'm lazy. I got this really cool app. I know this is silly and, you know, but it's been helpful for me. So maybe it would be helpful for you. It's called Streets.

My friend Mark Suster, who lost a lot of weight, put me on to it. And I've been talking to the founder of the company. He's in Australia. and it's a nice lifestyle business. I don't know if this could become a bigger business, but you set goals for yourself. So I have in my goals,

like standing a certain number of hours, drinking water, doing push-ups, climbing stairs, burning calories, eating a salad, which I haven't done, eating the smoothie,

which I've been drinking Munich, my friend Freeburg smoothie, working out, flossing my teeth, taking my vitamins, actually recording my weight, which is something I wasn't doing, doing weight training.

And I'm just trying to like set modest goals myself. And what streak does is it will lower the goals if you're not hitting them. So it's like, oh, you're not hitting six glasses of water a day. Should we set it to five for next week and see if you hit that? So it's kind of really smart. Ah, here we go. Question from the demo night, 789. So I like these, I like the ones that are like really personal and about your fears and about, you know, the stuff that maybe is less tactical in business. I mean, I do love tactical business questions because I'm a tactician, but I do like these ones that are more emotional in nature. How influential is social class and breaking into the corporate world, consulting

in finance coming from lower working class background, put one at a disadvantage. Certainly it does put you at a disadvantage, I think. I didn't know anybody at Stanford. I didn't know anybody at MIT. And I felt like I wasn't worthy or, you know, maybe that's the wrong way I say, not as worthy, but I did have to go build those connections.

And, you know, what was interesting is I found that people, some group of people thought of me in my 20s when I was in New York, making Silicon Allie reporter, which was my first magazine. Some people kind of resented me that I was in nobody and I became powerful with the magazine. And then once I realized that, that those powerful people were resenting me, I leaned into it. Lened into it. So I would host events for a hundred people. And I would specifically cap it at 100. And I would specifically leave people out and I would invite other people to come. And then some famous person would like, oh yeah, I'll definitely come to your 100 person dinner, I'm going to bring this person. I'm like, yeah, I'm sorry, there's no plus

ones. And I would say that to somebody who's worth $100 million. And they'd be like, oh, okay, well, can I bring somebody? Like, I'm really sorry. Maybe next time I'd love to meet them. But for now, the only of the 100 people coming to my dinner are people I know. And I've got 50 people on the waiting list already. But certainly next time, and I'd love to meet them. You should introduce me to my email. I'll have a cup of coffee with them. So I kind of was like, once I realized that people looked down on me a little bit or maybe dismissed me, I was like, oh, well how can I change that? I know.

I'll do the Silicon Alley 100. Silicon Alley was the name for New York's tech scene in the 90s. So I ranked, I made a ranked list as a nobody of the 100 most important people in business and technology in New York when I was 27 years old that I was taking people my age now, 50 year olds, and I was saying 17. They're 17 the most important.

I mean, I was deranged. So I'm not exactly telling you to do this, but I realized early on, I owned a magazine and I picked who was on the cover, man, that would be powerful. And I could lord that over people. And then people would respect me. So I took like a little bit of a maniacal approach to getting power because I didn't have it. And I think it was a little dysfunctional.

I think I, because I didn't have power because I didn't have status. I was like, I'm going to create and manufacture my own. I will show everybody. So back to the motivation question we started with, it was just a driver for me. I see it clearly now. At the time, I just thought I was fighting for my life to survive and be important in the world. And I think you should think about it that way as well. And it's less so today.

People don't care about your diploma as much as your skills. And especially in this work from home post-COVID world, you know, it used to be like, well, who went to journalism school? Okay, they're going to be a broadcaster. And then you'll look at something like YouTube and podcasting. Well, who gets to be a broadcaster? the person who broadcasts every day like my friend CP who's doing Nix fan TV like he didn't

it's the best of my knowledge CP can tell me I don't think CP the franchise went to like get a master's degree in communications and then was an intern at you know ESPN or something I don't think that's how he he built his channel and I don't think that's how

Red Scare built their channel or whoever else is killing it Joe Rogan you know podcasting it's not like somebody NBC said oh we're going to put the Rogan show on at 11 p.m. He didn't ask any gatekeeper to do it. You just do it, right? And it's about skill and showing up every day.

Really, and I hate to be like a motivational speaker here, but, you know, just from what I've learned in life, if you just do the work every day, that's why I put that sign behind me, do the work. That's like a reminder to all of you, but more than anything, it's a reminder to me. That's why I show up here every day. I literally had a friend of mine. They're like, J. Cal, you can do the podcast once a week. You don't have to do it five days a week.

You don't have to keep pushing yourself so hard. And I'm like, yeah, it's just not who I am. I just want to keep doing it every day. I like doing work every day. Sorry. I like the result of it too. I like the result that the audience is growing and I get to hang out with you guys and get all these great questions. All right.

I think we did enough questions. What is your standing amongst the besties? I am the least. I have the lowest net worth of all the besties. I might have the lowest IQ of all for, for besties. But I am in a bar fight

the one you would want to have with you in a zombie apocalypse I would be in charge and I would be the one who would survive the longest and I would be the best friend who would jump in front

of a punch for the other besties. So, you know, everybody's got their role in life. I think I'm the loyal one who is, we'll fight for their friends and I'm definitely the funniest

out of the four of us. That's for sure. For sure the funniest. All right. Talk to you soon. Everybody. Bye bye-bye. Thank you.