This Week in Startups - NYT’s Glossier hit piece, VC winters, Activist CEOs and Podcast live events with Acquired’s David Rosenthal | E1472

Episode Date: June 1, 2022

Today, Acquired’s David Rosenthal joins us. We discuss their recent Climate Pledge Arena Show (1:37), the new fundraising environment, and what the best founders and VC firms are doing (21:29), and we dig into the New York Times' latest hit piece on Glossier CEO Emily Weiss (37:40). We wrap with an optimistic look at what Australian billionaire and Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes is doing to take on Australia's biggest polluter (1:00:59). (00:00) Cold open (1:37) David Rosenthal from Acquired catches up with Jason and Molly (12:01) Coda - The All-in-one doc for teams, get a $1,000 credit at https://coda.io/twist (13:18) Crypto downturn, good for crypto in the long run? (20:11) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (21:29) “VC Winter” warnings for founders (36:24) Reforge - Apply for their next cohort at https://reforge.com/twist (37:40) Glossier hit piece - NYT decides to dunk on Glossier founder Emily Weiss (53:13) Jason reveals his workshop process for comedy (56:38) Founders’ response to NYT hit piece on Emily Weiss (1:00:59) Mike Cannon-Brookes trying to buy AGL, Australia's largest energy producer (1:13:05) Teasing tomorrow’s show: GameStop earnings

There's an important thing, too. He kind of baked into what you were saying, the mindset of the past few years, has been how hard is it going to be to raise the next round? Well, an assumption baked into that is that we raise the next round. That there will be one. Yes. The best companies throughout history, you pretty quickly get to a point where you control your own destiny, your cash flow positive, you're only raising money if you want to

raise money, but you never need to raise money. Almost all of the very best companies, you know, with the exception of like a Tesla that's like a very different case where it's like manufacturing physical world stuff, very capital intensive. You know, even Amazon like didn't raise that much money in the in the VC markets or in the private. They took out debt as a public company, but that's a different thing. Like, the faster you can get to controlling your own destiny, just the better you're going to be, period. This weekend startups is brought to by Coda. Coda is the all-in-one dock for teams. If you've got a stack of niche workflow tools or if you've been buried in docs and spreadsheets, Cota is the dock that

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All right, everybody. Welcome. It's Monday and here we are. No, it's Tuesday. But it feels like Monday because we all had a nice long weekend. If I feel like Monday, I'm like so ready to start the week yesterday. All weekend, I was like. You've been on one since we got back from Miami.

Clearly, people are the sun for Jason. Now he's just like, we are going to do this and this and this and this and this is going to happen. Here's the play. Here's the play. Let's go. I was wondering are you even coming back from now? Are you just going to stay? I am.

All right, everybody. So yeah, welcome to the show. We'll include this in the show. David Rosenthal is with us, you know, I'm from Acquired FM. We like to have them by once in a while just to have a little trio here to bat around the news. But it was a nice, everybody had a nice weekend, I take it.

Yeah, everybody was had a restful week. Great. Restful. Shut it all down. We needed it. Yeah. It's been a bit of, A friend of mine sent me a meme, and it was like, God was like, oh my God, I love you all so much.

Now deal with. And then it had like a blank space. And he just wrote in it like monkey box. So it was like a card of God like cradling the earth, you know, like shaking salt on or whatever. Like, you know, God's making his, you know, his little cauldron of our lives. And it's like, what do we have to worry about this summer? And I'm like, I'm just worrying about like, yeah, getting on the lake or something. I'm trying to figure out.

Anybody got big summer plans? Anybody planning a hot podcaster summer? Because I feel like this is the year of the hot podcaster summer. And we got three podcasters here. What's on your hot podcasting summer plans, David? We had a hot podcasting May. And we're going to. You did.

You did your live show. Events, events, events, events, events. So we did arena show in Seattle, which was unbelievable at the new climate pledge. So Chase Center in San Francisco is amazing. But I got to say, climate pledge is. unreal. They spent over a billion dollars on this place. It was just like, they are going for it with these arenas. Yeah. Well, they, because they're trying to get the the Sonics back, which is just criminal. But, uh, I always thought that was crazy that the

Seattle Supersonics left. Oh, it's such a good basketball town. Like, yeah, and there's so many billionaires from like Microsoft and Amazon. Like, there's like 50 people there who will billionaire billion, billionize that team. Oh, there was there is i mean people been saying this for years so who knows but like there there's gotta be a team coming to like come on i was living in seattle when they imploded the arena oh really the most heartbreaking uh you know the the one the kingdom or the king arena the kingdom oh yeah i'm old like it was a while a long time ago i love it that was the king of but that was that was that was back when nobody knew that gary pey was a dirt bag and we all

just thought he was so hot Yeah. But it was a... More innocent times. Never meet your heroes. Filed under. Never meet your heroes. They live long enough.

It was an iconic looking stadium. I remember from like the NBA games. It was iconic. So they saved the roof. It was from the World's Fair in a, when they built the Space Needle. So they saved the roof. They lifted the roof up and then they built a completely new arena under it.

So hot podcast summer for you is going to be maybe another stop on the acquired world tour. Well, so we did that. And then we did a really cool event at Emergence Capitals CEO summit. We interviewed Eric Yuan from Zoom and Peter Gaston from Viva. Oh, great guy. Carmel. And then we did Capitol Camp just last week in Columbia, Missouri, which is beautiful. Wow.

Man, we're exhausted now. You must be too. Here's the thing. I don't know. Jason doesn't get tired. Not really, no He doesn't get the cold He doesn't get tired

He comes back Everybody's like in recovery mode And Jason's like let's go Turns it up turns on the afterburners I used to pronounce it Interfatigable But I'm indefatigable I think it's a patogable

Indefatigable is how I've been described And you have deep-added Which is probably why you have all this extra energy I have de fat Into fat You got rid of fat You deep-added So I got rid of the fat

And now I'm indefatigable And now he's in Dazone Dazzoan Does I like it. I heard some rumors about a twist world tour happening. We're planning doing like a five city tour, I think. And very similar to what you did, like, you know, just for the fans to meet the fans and hang out.

Like maybe five cities, I don't know, 20 bucks a ticket, something just so you don't burn the ticket. That's exactly what we did. So good. Yeah. So I think that's like a nice thing to do and just meet fans. But I'm just trying to figure out like what startups would want, you know. And so we have some ideas. We're going to just bat around. But I want to make it plug in place so it's easy.

So Molly and I could like do literally, you know, I don't know, three of them in a week. You know, do Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Boston, New York, Miami. Boom, boom, boom. We can just be like rock stars, you know, travel between each city and get it done in a week, you know. Get it done in a week. I mean, if we have, you know, what I would do is I would send two teams. So I'd have like two people go to Boston the day before, have two people go to Miami. I'll go to New York on Monday.

We do the Monday. the next day, you know, the Boston people go to Florida. This is what Dyer Shreates did on their big tours. When they were doing like the brothers in arm tours, they had two stages. So one stage would be setting up in Philly while the other one was playing, you know, in Boston or something. You know, so they had two sets of gear and they could just play, you know, six or seven nights kind of situation. Because Molly and I would be on stage for 90 minutes. We can, we're pros of this.

But you got big plans for the summer, Molly? Anything coming up for you in the hot podcasting summer? Here's what happened to my child. here's what happened to my summer, which is that my child and his stupid work ethic was like, he turned 15 and he was like, I want a car, so I'm getting a job. Oh, so now he has a job.

He starts today. It's his first day of the job, but I'm like, wow. I want to go to Greece. Wow. And you got a job. So now I just got to figure out how to go to Greece without him, I guess.

Anyway, yes, I had a hole. However, I have started my hot summer off perfectly. I want you guys to know because I saw a Top Gun this weekend two times. It was, you started twice? I saw it on Saturday. I saw it again on Monday. Oh my God. So the female leave.

That is demented. Monica. I'm still taking this in. Amazing. My wife Jenny grew up with her. She's from Marin. Who is? Jennifer Connolly.

The female star. Monica. Oh, really? Bravo. Yeah, Barbara. Wait a second. You saw six hours of Top Gun this weekend. It was five.

It was two and a half hours. I said, and I would do it again. I want to go tonight. I mean, people are losing. I told you last year it's supposed to be unbelievable. And that people told me it was the best Tom Cruise movie ever when they saw it a year and a half ago. I know. Was, were they right?

Is it better than the first one? Is it the best Tom Cruise movie ever? Man, that's a tough one. Come on. It's such a big over. You can't just like, it's top three. Yeah. It's incredible.

He's so restrained. Like, it's just like, also, if you are the world's giant nerd, which I am and Top Gunn is your number one favorite movie of your whole entire life. then this Top Gun Maverick will just absolutely thrill you because it's like Easter egg after Easter egg after like callback after callback. Like the opening scene, not to give it too much away, is a shot for shot remake of the original. But like with today's planes and so in quality, like you just immediately are just like, USA, USA.

Like I came out of there just like. Let's go. So fared up. Apparently is Tom Cruise, is he like the older like mentor figure or is he still the heartthrob in this one? It's all about Tom Cruise. This movie is only about map. No more spoilers. Okay, no.

No more spoilers. Go see it immediately. But on Thursday when we do this weekend streaming. We'll talk about the new Obi-Wan. So you got to get your Obi-Wan on if you haven't. I watched that. It was a very relaxing. Yeah, I had a big old birthday party.

Oh, right. Oh, do you have a party? Yeah. Yeah. 30. 32 again. I've just been partying since like last Wednesday. And now I'm like, okay, back to work.

I was, I would have to cabba for the weekend. I was at a party. friend of mine's birthday party and it was quite nice, quite nice. I can't talk about it because I signed an NDA apparently, but my party was exactly like that. The highlight of this party was we were playing cards

under like a nice veranda type thing. Like, I don't know what you call that in Italy when they have like a trellis or something above you. I don't know what they call that. It was quite nice. A pergola. A pergola. Like a pergola.

We're like in a pergola. And on the beach. And there's some boats out there. boat all of a sudden, you know, we look up and there's a boat smashing into the rocks. And this boat is just capsized all of a sudden with, you know, six or seven people on it. And it's like a big like fishing boat, like small yacht type situation. You know, probably got three cabins and, you know, two levels. And it's on the rocks, Molly. Getting so we like, how did that happen? The theory was like it was moored and the anchor broke.

And, you know, this, you know, Cabo situation is a little. little bit rough the ocean. And it's getting smashed against the rocks. And I said, oh, look, the USS Solana. And there was somebody at the table who had a very large position in Solana. And they were like, oh, no. And I kid you not, they try to pull this boat off the rocks. You know, there's people on, like, there are people on paddle boards pulling ropes out to other boats. And for the next hour, we watched the USS Salana tip over. And then finally break apart. in the ocean, fully capsized, and they shut the beach down because oil and parts of the boat, because this thing got so smashed at the rocks, glass, you know, everything in the boat

is just in the water. It was the first time I've ever seen a boat capsized. And, you know, this is water. You would be like, yeah, I can swim across that water. No problem. And turns out. A boat was demolished into tiny little pieces of rubble. Also, I had one conversation with that guy after several glasses of wine and I went home,

about $300 worth of salina. Oh, no. Yeah. It's so easy to go after crypto right now. I bet very small because I'm not good at this game. I bet very small. If you're a startup, you know you have to say where you can. I'm talking time, I'm talking money, and I'm talking bandwidth.

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Head to coda.coma.com. To sign up and get a thousand dollar credit that's CodA. dotio slash twist for $1,000 off. I think it's fine to place some bets, but I mean, let's start there. The markets, David, have been crazy. And crypto, of course, we knew that that would be if we're going to move to value investing, a place where maybe there's been a larger focus on raising money and building cap tables. They're not exactly cap tables, but the focus has been on selling the vision and not building the reality.

What's your take on it now? did you, because you had started dipping your toe, I believe, into some crypto and thinking about it. Yeah. So, one, how much you down on Solana? And then two, how do you look at, you know, I'm not saying this in a joking way,

an industry that's been focused almost exclusively on vision and raising and maybe five or 10% on actually building products? Well, fortunately, I'm still up on Solana, as I'm sure is your friend. He's doing just fine. But I mean, I think like it's straight to say, right? But like this is this is what happens has happened many times before in crypto. This is waves in all startups. And, you know, I think the title go out and we'll see who's got swimsuits on in the old Howard Mark's quote. And we'll see who doesn't. And, you know,

I think there are plenty of projects in crypto that have swimsuits on. Salana being one of them in my opinion. Not investment advice, but but yeah, have you guys had Adam from Brain Trust on Twist? I don't think so, no. Oh, you should. He's great. He was the founder of Doctor on Demand,

and he founded a company called Webbee project called Brain Trust. You know, they're doing dozens of millions in revenue, real customers, Enterprise Fortune 500. It's like the best, the crew, analogy is like Fiverr or Upwork, but as a token economy so that though, you're actually incentivized to

stay on the network. And they're doing great. Audius is another one, building real businesses. So like, I think it's plenty of. Yeah. Audius is an interesting one. They're going to kind of be like Spotify plus the clearing house for all the rights and music if that works. And the three of us made a track together. And we played, you know, three different roles in that. We could split up the equity in it. exactly so yeah I mean so there's tons of yeah it sounds like though you are feeling like there are products like that seems to be that's been our big complaint you know on the show I think that's what jason has said many times and

we've sort of said like look the primary use case for this so far has been like store of value and gambling token go up yeah token go up exactly token go up t g you and we business model there was like a little back and forth this weekend jason was was tweeting about this question of like, where are the products, right? That people are getting value out of. Consumers are getting value out of.

It's been 10 years. And somebody I thought made a somewhat fair point that at this point, if you give another 10 years, because like internet companies weren't necessarily providing value for the customer immediately, that it always takes 10 years

for any new technology to find a market. Do you think that's fair? Yeah, Jason's like, no. I'm just going to lob this bomb out here and see what happens. Like, where are we in the cycle of any new technology with the caveat that, like, no one was swapping derivatives and financializing the shit out of the early internet to make it, you know, to turn it into like a trillion dollar store value. My guess is we're probably somewhere in between the situation in 1989, 2000,

with the dot-com bust where, like, there was real, there were real companies. there's real technology there. There was a lot of fraud. It got washed out. But like, we came out the other side. I think we're somber in between that and like just lots of financial fraud and hype. I don't think we're totally in fraud and hype. But, you know, there was, it was unprecedented over the past few years.

I think a lot of people who are making the analogy weren't there for it. So, you know, like somebody was like, well, you know, this is kind of like 85 to 95 to 94 in the internet era. And I was like, the web browser. came out like in the early, you know, like 93 and 94, kind of got commercialized. So actually what you're talking about is really the PC era and the dial-up era where you couldn't show images on AOL or, you know, if you did download an image, it might be five minutes. Like literally, you could download a picture, but you had to go get a cup of coffee. And so I was kind of like, I don't know if your time periods are correct here.

I think there's a lost decade for crypto. I think all the interesting stuff that happened in the first three or four years, you know, 2009, 10, 11, 12, Bitcoin starts emerging. and other projects. I think then it got so derailed by the just massive influx of money. People really did suspend disbelief, put too much money into it. And since money is part of the rails of this, it's kind of like, you know, it's kind of like the electricity of this, right?

Like, so you couldn't build the internet without electricity and CPUs. Like, you can't build this without the internet, without, you can, you can abstract the servers that you would have to normally buy, but you kind of replace them with cash and money on the else. So I think we've lost a number of years to people just getting obsessed with the money racing process as opposed to the building. So I do think this could be like a really great thing, this recession for crypto, because are the next coin offerings going to pull $100 million out? I know Kevin Rose did $100 million in NFT sales, but he's Kevin Rose. So he's kind of a legend. It's got a big following. But I just wonder if, you know, if we have less money flowing in,

then people can focus less on their net worth and, you know, the acceleration of this stuff and more on the use case. And they have to deliver in order to get the reward as opposed to now they have to pitch in order to get the reward. And I followed it up, Molly, with a, you know, a tweet the other day, I think yesterday or the day before. Listen, there's a group of founders who got better at telling the story than making the reality. And I think that we need to get into reality building mode more than anything. You know, it's great. You know, we all teach people how to pitch too. You know, we want people to tell the story well.

Molly teaches pitching. At our accelerator, we teach you will to pitch. We give them notes on their decks. He had to make the story more believable. At a certain point, you know, like seeing is believing. And I'd like to see the products. And so that's what I'm literally training my team to do is just a little more actually building of stuff. And that's been, I think, the dialogue we had Molly a bunch of venture capitalists, myself included, talking about VC Winner.

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And then maybe David's thoughts on if he's aligned with this vision. of what the next year is going to be about. There's been a lot of, if you're watching the video, a lot of this, a lot of just putting the hand up being like, you know what, just hold up, calm down. According to CB Insights funding for global startups is about $58 billion in commitments midway through Q2, which is on pace to drop by 20% quarter over quarter. All of the early stage investors, really investors at every stage,

I think, are making the same warning about a VC winter, Secoia Craft, benchmark, Lightspeed, YC, Jason sent a note to all of our founders. Wall Street Journal noting that in past downturns, the Federal Reserve cut rates and pumped money into markets to support the economy, providing liquidity and cheap capital, which, as we all know, was great for all the crypto projects we just discussed and also the funding environment generally. But this time, of course, the central bank is raising rates and taking money out of the system, making money more expensive.

And, of course, then, you know, as we have discussed, almost ad-nauzziamentation. this point and we're so early in this downturn runway is everything. Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and an early Twitter investor said in a blog post, quote, I would be planning to ride this thing out for at least 18 months or more. Sequoia said it's not going to be a V-shaped recovery. It's going to be a market downturn that impacts consumer behavior, labor markets, supply chains. And Bill Gurley tweeted the cost of capital has changed materially. And if you think things are like they were, then you are headed off a cliff like Thelma and Louise. I really love of his like old guy

Well, I guess you're headed off a cliff like Velma and Louise. Right? That's my Bill Gurley impersonation at the table when we play cards. The All In Summit with him and

Brad was just great. That was everything. Brad is like, bling, bling, point, point, point. Did you teet up with Bill you've predicted five of the last three recessions? I said that was somebody else's joke about

another person. So that was a like all good comedy. That was, I workshop that one off for somebody else's. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I mean, so what are your thoughts? I mean, I know, David, like, you know, you're, you haven't lived through a ton of cycles here, but what is your plan as you deploy your, you know, microfund and go into your next fund and then have to mentor these companies that are at the earliest stages? What are the discussions you're having with your founders? Totally. Well, um, you know, it's funny. I graduated from college in 2007.

So right at the peak and then like right into the crash. And I was working on Wall Street. So that was fun times. But I don't know. My lesson from that is like it was fine. You know, like yeah, it was rough for a couple years. But it was fine. It'll be fine again.

Everything will be fine in the long run. But I was thinking the whole time when you were describing everything and I've been reflecting on this too. So the book, the Snowball that Alice Schroeder wrote about Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. It's so good. It's a classic. It was the main source, like the backbone of our Berkshire Hathaway series. So she opens it up. I think it came out. I want to say it was published like 2010, maybe 2009, 2010. So kind of the middle of the financial crisis. She opens the book with the scene at the Allen & Company conference is either 99 or 2000. I think it was 2000.

And like right before the crash, like the equivalent of November last year. And Warren gives this speech. And like he hadn't said anything about dot com, tech bubble, anything. He gives the kind of reluctantly gives this speech at, at the conference. And his point is he says, is like, interest rates are everything. Interest rates are the law of gravity in the economy. And like, whatever you think you're, you know, doing, like, you should always just look back at interest rates and like they go up, gravity goes up.

They go down. Gravity goes down. And, and like, that's what's going on here. And, you know, they're already, like, the Fed is not going to bring them back down. Gravity is only going to go up right now. So, like, yes, it's, I think everybody's right. It's going to be hard for a while. But, you know, in the long run, the way you make money is you build things of value.

Right. Do you think everyone doesn't change, yeah. And that doesn't change at all. Yeah, that doesn't change. So do you think, like, this level of sort of warning is CYA by the investment? class or, you know, I mean, it seems like it's a fair warning for people, like prepare for 18 months, like get prepped. But it sounds like you, do you think it's not that severe or do you more think like, look, this like all things is survivable by smart, capable, capable, prepared

people? I think one of our, at our talk at Capitol camp, we did our 12 favorite lessons from 200 stories, seven years of acquired. And one of the lessons is never, never fight against a will to survive. Like, you can survive anything. It's just about your will. No matter how bad things get, like the best companies, Nvidia, you know, Facebook, people forget, like, people thought they were dead at the IPO. They missed mobile. Like, you can survive anything. And so it's just about the mindset. So I think it's good of VCs to be like pushing. The more you can as a founder and a company have a mindset of like, I'm here to survive. You know, we talked to Eric Yuan. Like, he literally, we played the clip in the talk.

We asked him about what his goals were building a company. His answer was, I was always trying to survive, survive. He said it like 17 times. Wow. If that's your mindset as a founder, no matter what the market, you're going to be set up for success.

So I think it's good for founders now to start having that mindset. I think also there's a little bit with VCs, you always got to look at their incentives. So all these people that are telling companies this, well, of course, they want to pay better prices for companies. So like there's a little bit of, an incentive for them to be doing this.

You know, you could see that, like, cynically that, hey, maybe people want to pay a lower price, or since there are not going to be major exits on the back end, they know they have no choice but to pay lower prices in order to make their funds viable. So it could also be pragmatism. You know, a lot of VCs were like, you know what, if it's going to cost $15 million or $20 million for a stage fund coming out of an accelerator, I don't like this price, but I'll pay it because it's triple what we were paying 10 years ago or seven years ago, but the exits are triple as well, you know,

or they're 5X as well, the big ones. So, you know, maybe this is the new normal. And as Warren Buffett said, and you recapped quite eloquently, like gravity's gravity, like if you can't raise large amounts of money, and, you know, things are going to stay low for a little while and it might loosen up in the future. But I do think VCs in my experience are trying to reduce the number of zeros and trying to get founders motivated

who haven't seen this before to take it really seriously because my lord the absolute I don't want to use like the word entitlement here because it's not like founders came into this with this you know like oh I can just raise money

it's my God given right it's in the constitution I get a gun and you know I get to say whatever I want on a soapbox and I'm entitled to like a million dollar seed round. Like, no, I don't think people thought that, but I do think what they were trained to think over time, which might have put some entitlement in folks, or just unrealistic expectations might be a better way to describe it, is that founders started to have unrealistic expectations that each round of funding was easier.

And the funding was not tied to performance, really. It was tied to new market entrance. So, you know, when Masa came in or Tiger or a co-to or these new funds. You know, these new entrants were going to place bets that had no choice but to place the bets or getting the management fees. So, you know, each round gets easier.

Now each subsequent round gets harder or the cumulative effort you put into the last three rounds is going to be double to close the fourth round. Like, people are not going to expect that kind of gravity. So, you know, you might have been able to dunk and do a 360 dunk and now you're just not going to be able to get your heels. Like, you're going to be wearing lead, boots. Like, let's see you dunk with lead boots on. And I think that's why VCs are so concerned

is, you know, but I had three different companies tell me, hey, we laid people off in the last two weeks or we did a reorg. And they didn't go to their boards or consult their investors, you know, which is the founders right. I don't, there's nothing in a board document or that says, like, you, if you do layoffs, you have to tell your board or consult your investors. Like, a founder can right size the company. Oh, I'm trying to think of any situation where I've seen that in a document. So I saw people doing, you know, call it 5, 10% up to like 25, 35% or just make the plans and just inform us this is happening. It started or it's happening. To me, incredible because, you know, in some cases they had six months and now they have 12 or they had 12 and now they have 24. In one case,

I think it was like 24 to like 36 or the person put the infinity sign in front of it. And I'm like, okay, here we go. People are actually taking the medicine. And that to me is great. because like you said, if you don't give up, then there's a chance for a return. But if you give up, now we've literally marked that to zero forever. The company's out of business. It's game over. This game over. Now we've locked in a zero.

Right. But there's an important thing, too, kind of baked into what you were saying, the mindset of the past few years has been how hard is it going to be to raise the next round? Well, an assumption baked into that is that we need to, we raise the next round. That there will be one. The best companies throughout history, you pretty quickly get to a point where you control your own destiny, your cash flow positive, you're only raising money if you want to raise money, but you never need to raise money. Almost all of the very best companies, you know, with the exception of like a Tesla that's like a very different case where it's like manufacturing, physical world stuff, very capital intensive. even Amazon, like, didn't raise that much money in the VC markets or in the private.

They took out debt as a public company, but that's a different thing. Like, the faster you can get to controlling your own destiny, just the better you're going to be, period. You know, Viva Systems is a great example of this. We interviewed Peter. Most people don't know about this company because they only raised $7 million of venture capital, and they only burned three of it. And they're a $20 billion public company doing. high, high touch enterprise sales to very large Fortune 500 clients, usually you think you need

to burn a lot of cash to do that. It's just a mindset thing. Like very quickly, they were like, no, we don't need to do that. Excellent, excellent point too, which is like, why are you, if you're a SaaS company, why are you at a series E at a $2 billion valuation? Like maybe we should just use fewer letters in the alphabet for the next few years. It made sense over the past few years because capital was so available and cheap. Like, why not? And especially as a founder, you take secondary, of course. But like, you know, that's not the way to build a great company. I'm just really happy to see such an honest, candid dialogue very early in this game. We were sounding the alarm bells, you know, for, you know, two years about how frothy this was.

And, you know, I always would tell people the same thing. Like, this feels frothy. You know, it's like a, it's like a coppet. You know, you ever get the cappuccino and you're like, oh my God, so much great foam. And then you're like, is there a drink here? Because I'm in like a venting cup here and like, I'm trying to find the liquid. You know, you get a, you ever get a Starbucks? You start tilting it and you're like, is there any liquid in this cup or did you just give me a cup of foam?

And I would start to feel, you know, like I'm getting a cup of foam here. I'm looking for the revenue. I'm looking for the customer. And it's been a very frustrating year or two for me in a lot of meetings or working with our associates here and researchers at launch and the syndicate saying like, what's the revenue and who are the customers? And they're like, oh, this person is incredibly charismatic. I'm like, okay, well, what's your thesis?

They're like, oh, this is a huge market? And I'm like, can we have a discussion about, you know, customers product team, customers product team? And I just, I try to center all my discussions when we make an investor around the customers, the product, and the team. And boy, it's very easy for everything else to just, you know, take center stage. And so for the people who've gotten really good at performance and selling, now it's time to get good at hiring great team members

at a reasonable price that are going to kick ass managing them well, making sure you're getting every drop of efficiency out of every person on your team, which is what I'm working on right now. Which, you know, I might seem a little crazy right now

because I've been very laissez-faire, like letting people kind of pursue their stuff, but I just told everybody last week, send me your calendars. And let's look at, I'm doing a calendar review with the investment team today at our investment team meeting, David,

I was like, are we as efficient as we need to be? What are people spending time on? And let's just have an honest dialogue about that. Do we need to meet more companies or do we need to go deeper on companies? Who's meeting with the most companies? Why are we getting, are we meeting with companies? We should have disqualified before we did the meeting. So we're kind of doing meetings to have our calendars filled,

but we should be going and hunting more than sorting. So I think this is the time and I'm doing it myself also at Inside, where we've been profitable for now, like a lot of quarters. and we just raised a little bit on Republic because I like the idea of like, I just like the, we had done it on C-Invest previously. I like both those platforms.

I like the idea of our customers having it, but I'm super, super focused on profitability, you know, and having every team member be efficient. So go through the list of every team member, do a one-on-one with them, do a one-on-few,

and just have that discussion with your teams. Are we putting the right amount of resources on each project? What projects are we working on? Which ones hit the bottom line? And are we going to make it through this? You know, and you really do have,

to have that discussion about efficiency. And layoffs are part of that. Good example of, it's never, it's only game over when you decide it's game over. Like there's so many times over the past few years where you probably could have said game over right. And here you are,

building a good business. It's really become a fantastic business now. You know, we're over $4 million in revenue a year. It's profitable. I've got 30 people over there. And then the velocity in which new products are coming out has just been great. So it's, you know, I think I could 10x their revenue from here and have like a literal viable.

viable competitor to LinkedIn at some point, you know, or, you know, co-existor to Reddit, LinkedIn or something over there. Reforge equals career development. Career development equals a raise and a better title. It's that simple, folks. You work in growth, you work in product, maybe you work in marketing or engineering. Those are the most important functions in any startup and even the at-scale companies. Let's be honest.

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He has other news. And I don't know if you saw this story, David. I know Molly did. But it's time for, as they say in the, you know, privately, this is not my term, but privately in the media business, there's a term chicks for clicks. And there was yet another hit piece on a female founder. We had just gotten over talking about this, Molly. And another one dropped this weekend, Glossier, said a half a classier founder, Emily Weiss,

I guess, handed over the reins of the company that she built. And the New York Times decided, well, what a time to dunk on successful women. Never a bad time, really, if you want to get flex. Never a bad time to, yeah. So in a blog post. It's especially a capitalist woman? Oh, my God. Yeah, I mean, people.

Who built a brand on makeup. Ew. Exactly. Yeah. So she built this cosmetics company from 2014 on. And the gender reporter at the New York Times. Literally. There's a gender reporter at the New York Times.

I listen, I'm not on the all right. You know that. But I was shocked that the business story about women was relegated to the gender reporter. Like, I guess she doesn't qualify for the business journalism, sex, or reporters. But the gender reporter wrote, the sunsetting of the girl boss is nearly complete, as cynical as a headline as you can write. And here's the New York Times promoting the story. And so, of course, promotion of a story, as we know, sometimes goes a little bit more aggressive.

and click baiting, and this is Chicks for Clicks, Emily Weiss, founder of Glossier, and the face on the Mount Rushmore of startup culture. That's not true, but okay, will no longer be the beauty company's CEO. She's the latest of the so-called girl bosses to step away from their creations, effectively marking the end of the archetype.

I mean, what utter bullshit, Molly, your thoughts? I mean, it's so important. My thoughts are effectively unprintable. Like unprintable. I mean, person builds excellent company that is a runaway hit with its target demographic. I mean, I remember working at Marketplace like,

and I don't know, five or six years ago, literally every woman of a certain age, like every woman in her 20s and 30s was like, oh my God, do you like Glossier, glossier, glossier. It was the only word on anyone's lips.

It is near as I can tell, by all accounts, very successful. And having reached a point where Emily Weiss thought maybe someone else should come in and take the reins because being the CEO is a really hard job and or this company is growing and I have other pursuits because I am only 37 years old and I've already crushed it once. So I'm going to go crush it somewhere else that you get girl boss. Yeah. I mean, it's, I have told Jason.

It doesn't matter what happened there. Like, you know. Who cares? You're going to say, Molly. Who cares? Well, I was going to say, I told you once about being at a dinner with a female CEO founder when the story came out about Steph Corey of Away. Yes.

And this woman saying to me like, oh, no, we're all waiting for this. Like, we are all waiting for this version of the story to come out about us. We're too bitchy or we're to mean at this or whatever. When like every one of us has worked for an a whole. Yes. Like, it's fine for something. and not for others. Like these, I don't,

I don't understand why anybody is unironically using the term girl boss for any reason whatsoever. Like, it's just like, it's a way to diminish the person. I, I just want to say it out. And I know it's,

listen, it's my friend, it's my friend Sophia's brand. So I understand girl boss was like her way of saying like, you know, I'm capturing this. And I respect Sophia and what she's built. And she's a legit entrepreneur.

And she's awesome. But I think when you take her branding, and then you're like, how do we diminish this person who's built an amazing company and you're like, end of the girl boss archetype. I don't know that Emily is opting into that archetype. I don't think she modeled her career off of Sophia. So you're kind of just saying, let's ghettoize all of these women,

put them over here in this box. They're all part of this silly little archetype of girl bosses. They're using the term girl boss, not in the way Sophia used it, which was like taking back the power of that being a derogatory term. Right. You know, and I don't know. And the away founder thing just also pissed me off too.

But David, what are your thoughts? Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's just ridiculous. It's like, you know, the complaint such as there is one that I could find in any of these pieces is like they were demanding bosses. Okay. You know, like, that's the job.

That's the job. I think that is the job. And it's hard to build a great company. Yeah, I just, you know, it's so The other half of this, there's the like completely terrible and just like puzzling ridiculous, you know, gender aspect to all this, especially the gender reporter at the New York Times writing this. But there's also just like the traditional media versus tech and capitalism element here that I think is driving a lot of this too.

And it's like, this is a subset of that, David. I think it's a very important point. is there's an anti-capitalism vibe on the left, which, by the way, as somebody who's voted Democrat their entire life, who is a capitalist? I think actually that's all of us on this program. I'm just like, can you please stop this? Like, we, we, there's, I would say the majority of capitalists, like, in tech overwhelmingly are on the left.

And why are you driving us away? Like, love us. We'll make donations. I want to be part of it. Like you're literally pushing us out of the tent. We're like, I thought this was our tent. And you're like, no, no, no. Get out of the tent.

I'm like, there's another tent across the street. Would you like us in that tent? They're like, no, you can't go in that tent, but you can't be in this one. It's like, so I stand in the middle of the street between the two tens? They're like, yeah, that's where you belong. I'm like, okay, well, we're going to need to put up a tent. And that tent is going to be between these two parties, I think is where the world is heading with this anti-capitalism.

And by the way, I just said on this program, I asked everybody on my team to share their calendar with me so I could talk to them about how they're optimizing their time. If a woman did, and you know what, there are people writing notes right now. I'm a great idea. Somebody's in Slack right now watching this live. Can everybody share their calendar with me? I want to just go over your personal productivity and mentor you on time management. And on the weekend, I said, can somebody tell me the best time management systems that

they've used and why? Because there are some people in the team who have empty calendars. And I'm wondering, like, maybe they would be good to have like something every day that they did at certain times to optimize their goals and their KPIs. If a woman did that, they'd be like, obsessive, compulsive, Molly Wood, you know, demands to micromanage people's calendars, riding her team, micromanaging. 100%. What is the, I will say, it's a double standard.

Where's the anti-capitalist part in the Glossiate thing, do we think? And I'm not saying that has not existed. It has, but I didn't see it here. Yeah, hold on. There was some, well, David, did you have a specific one that you felt was like. I think it's in the overall thread of like, are what these women have done wrong is be demanding bosses. Right. And I think that is like there's an inherent anti-capital.

And want people to work hard and like, right, right, right, right. Got it. Okay. Yeah. I don't know. This whole thing reminds me of, I think this was a Sequoia framework. I can't remember where I saw this. This might have been a Don Valentine thing.

that like if you think about people in the world, if you're looking for great founders, there's like a, you put it into people into a two by two matrix of satisfied and complacent with the world, or dissatisfied with the world is sort of like you put that on one one axis. And on the other axis, you put does something about it or talks about it. And like the craziness about all of this is that like it feels like,

whatever the New York Times represents here, they're in the dissatisfied and talks about it, but doesn't do anything about it, camp. And that's like, that is the most toxic quadrant to be in. If you're satisfied with the world, whether you do something or don't do something, like you're pretty happy to be around. But like, if you want a founder, somebody who's going to improve the world, you want to be dissatisfied and does something about it. And just like going after people who do something about, they see problems in the world or

they see opportunities and they do something. like that should be celebrated. Yeah. One of the things I hate about journalism today is just like generalization and repeating of allegations without specific names on them. So over the last several years, many of these women have stepped down from their roles for various reasons, M-Dash, including allegations of racism and toxic leadership, M-Dash, Ms. Weiss has stayed on.

So they're like taking all the female bosses together. And I think the toxic leadership quote and the racism quote is, that the away founder had people of color in their support group, like customer support, and that because they don't put in here what they're referring to or even a link, they kind of are like making this generalization that female bosses are racist and toxic leaders. And it's like, hey, really? Because the way they say it, this is the New York Times. Over the last several years, many of these women have stepped down from their roles for various reasons.

okay, including allegations of racism, toxic leadership. So you're kind of bucketing this whole group in the, in the reader's mind as there's some like pervasive racism and toxic leadership going on here, which we all know is just not the case. In the case of the away founder, she was like,

everybody has to work over the holidays because we sell luggage. And that's when we sell half of her products is the holidays. So like this, who, what editor lets this line through? Like if I was editing this, I'd say, who are you talking?

about. Be specific. No generalizations, but because this is the gender reporter, and I'm not saying gender is not a viable topic. Sure, I would like to read stories about gender. I think it's cool to have a gender writer. But this is what happens when the gender writer writes the business story and nobody's editing them. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Be specific. If you're going to make these allegations and bunch everybody together. This is what happens when an editor fails. There is some journalism slander here. Yes, it is not what happens. I said the editor should have edited this. It is not what happens when the gender reporter avoids the business story. Like, watch it.

The gender reporter might be a great business reporter. We don't know. What we're talking about here is like this, why, what are these generalizations? Where are editors failing? Most importantly, why are editors deciding that this is the story that needs to be written? Like, how are we in the year of our Lord 2022, having a female CEO of a successful company step away and some editor somewhere being like, oh, let's make this a girl boss story. and not having any self-awareness, like any awareness that this is going to go poorly because why wouldn't it?

Like, nobody ever stops and says, what does this have to do with her gender? If no, kill the story. Like, if zero, yes. Don't write it. Right. Like, I just, it is just utterly baffling and it is only, I mean, to your point, David, it is only divisive, right? It divides men CEOs from women CEOs.

It divides white women CEOs from women CEOs of color, right? Because then you have black women on Twitter being like, where's the outrage for black women CEO or black women founders who are constantly getting their asses kick? In fact, girl boss became a pejorative because it was like, it only meant white women. Like it literally is like, how can we tear down society even more like bit by bit by bit by bit and make sure that no one is ever friends again? Well, I think that is the, that is where, you know, this journalism,

plus identity politics, clickbait, train leads you. It just leads you to this nightmare scenario where, like you're saying, everything has to be broken into little atoms and, you know, this woman is a white woman, the person, you know, who had the complaint, you know, is this color, skin, is this, you know, gender? And then all of a sudden it's like, did anybody ever ask, is this a kick-ass business? Right. And do we need to dunk on this person? And it's like, well, if we don't dunk on them, we're missing an opportunity for

I think this is why people have lost a little bit of respect for the, for, I mean, you expect this from Business Insider, right? You expect Business Insider to just be cynical and go for clicks. You expect Huffington Post to be cynical and go for clicks. But I think what's disappointing about this is it's the New York Times and they don't write anything positive about female founders. And it's just like this trend where it's just dunk, dunk, dunk. And even though, even though I just yelled at you about the general reporter, it is true that

I read this whole story three times. And I still don't exactly know if Glacier is doing well as a business right now. Right. I don't know. I can't tell from this story. I mean, if she left because everything's going great. Like,

I don't even know if Emily Weiss left Glacier because everything's going great and she's ready to try something new or if something, something, something, girl boss. I don't. I mean, listen,

they raised funding, um, they say and reached unicorn status. Those are incredible things. They laid off dozens of corporate staff members, which means nothing, right? Like,

you're always, literally just talking about how VCs are telling everybody to do that. That's a good thing. Yes. That's a good thing. And some company called second measure says that their sales were down 26%. And then during the pandemic,

Glacet Grappled surclosures. Well, duh, like, so did Apple. So did everybody. So again, like, it's really like, and the retail employees were upset. About the pandemic.

a classier. So like, where is the actual, this person is a terrible C? Hard time getting direct to consumer customers. Like, other business. Yeah. Like, I just don't. Yeah. This is part of the, like, I feel like I never know anything.

I just know people's opinions about things or the labels that they want to put on those things. But I'm not sure what I know. Anyway, it was, it seems as though it was roundly rejected on Twitter. I would hope. And yet it doesn't mean that some other female founder won't have some bull-gill-girl-boss story written because no one ever learns. I mean, I just don't even respond or I just write a funny response back to the New York Times. Because at New York Times contacted me last night to, like, comment on their profile of Professor Galloway.

And I'm like, sorry. Really? Here are my, here are my, here are my, I've been workshopping about replying. Reply number one. Who? The New York Times is doing a profile about a guy who co-hosts a show with one of its biggest names. Yeah. That the New York Times itself promotes.

Yeah. I'm like, I want to know, Jesus Christ. So dirty. For all in intros for all this. Like, what's,

um, roll back the curtain. So, David's like, I have other questions. Roll back the curd. Roll back the curd. Uh, so,

you know, in terms of comedy, uh, people are like, hey, you've got a good sense of humor in a quick way. Um, I'm Irish and I'm a writer.

And I came from Brooklyn where people just break each other's chops. But in all sincerity, like, that was just kind of gave me probably like a four out of ten on the humor scale, sense of humor. But what happened was when I lived in L.A., I became friends with a gentleman named Kevin Pollack, who I met at a poker game, who was an actor. And we made some jokes, you know, in poker in this poker game. And then he invited me to his home game. And I was lucky enough to play in his home game for a while when I lived there. and, you know, he would have, you know, Hank Azaria or Jim Brooks or, you know, pick a comedian, you know, like some of that, I don't want to give up, drop too many names, but, you know, like major, major comedians.

And some of these are very public with talking about, that's why I mentioned their names. And I helped Kevin set up his podcast, the Kevin Pollock chat show back when I started this week in startups. Now, he's since stopped doing it, but he had a great run. But just watching Kevin, how quick what he was and these other guys, I'd be sitting at the table thinking, in between hands like, wow, the jokes I tell at my poker game, I'm the funniest guy, I'm a poker game. I'm suddenly the least funny guy at this poker game. And I would just study the way they crafted jokes. And he was very generous at me explaining how jokes were at times. So that was where I kind of got like a little, it was like going to, it was like going to the

groundings or something. Like you just got to sit there and watch them craft jokes and break each other's chops. And so I fit right in and I learned a lot about it there. So that was my quick education. on it. But I would like to get a comedy coach at some point. Somebody to kind of train me on it. And I was just at a roast. I was just asked to be the roast MC at a

birthday party recently. And people said, like, you could do this for a living. There's no really up your game. I mean, since the... Have I? Yeah. Well, like, maybe like a little credit to the workshopping factor. Like, you got producer Nick in there.

Yeah, I do have producers. It's a team effort. You're clearly seeing it seriously. You're taking your comedy. It's a funny family is what it is. I would say I, yeah, taking it seriously. Yeah, my producer Nick, Calicanis, who is also my nephew, who I poach from Major League Baseball, where he was the number one editor to come work

here on this show, is naturally funny as well. So we will sit in a Google Doc coming up with goofy things to say about the besties. And we're like, oh, my God, that's, that is way too harsh. And, you know, oh, my God, that's right. So literally the dialogue is like, we got to bring that back 20%. So what you hear in those intros, which I'm going to stop, by the way,

because I think it's getting tiresome to do it every week. Like, I think six or seven weeks in a row is enough. Those are probably 60, 70% of the punches are pulled there. So you can imagine like some of these could be... I would love to see those Google Docs. Oh, that Google Docs. I know.

Someday somebody's going to leak the history. Instant cancel. I would be like, yeah, I turned off my edit history on that. I can blame Nick and the other. other producers like, that's them. I didn't edit that one. You taken that to the grave.

Yeah. So did anybody, I mean, a lot of other founders, I guess, you know, chimed in on this. I like Des Trainers. Or you could try 37-year-old female entrepreneur who started a company now worth over a billion dollar success to a new leadership role, having previously recruited an excellent successor. The end. The end. Right.

And we're done. Just make it a business story. Yeah. And then we could interview her and ask her about her great. success and what she plans on doing next and her lessons in business. Oh, wait, that would be pro-capitalist. AOC Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders don't like that and our subscribers don't like pro-capitalism. Oh my God, you guys are hilarious. Well, speaking of things. Oh. Oh, yeah, we should have her on. Yeah. Come on. Totally ever on. I've been trying to

have the away founder on for a long time. Yeah. A long time. But I think Steph Corey just, I think for her, like, do you, I understand why she hasn't come on or she doesn't talk about it, Because do you want your career to be defined? Yeah, yeah. By, you know, this label and then have everything be like, so are you a girl boss? Or like, what was it like to be called a girl boss? You know, well, it's just like.

That was one of the, actually, I thought it was cool. You haven't released it yet, but so I'm looking forward to watching it. But the whole Palmer Lucky thing, like, that was, whatever you think about what happened, he's moved on, you know, and like built something else. And like, that's the best thing to do. I think you are, yeah. And that's coming out this week, by the way. I saved it for last.

I decided it would be better to make it the last one. Let everybody talk about her for like an extra week. I just let it be the last one. But, yeah. The woman from the wing, she got, she got barbecue too at some point. But here we are out here. Like, Adam Newman's got a show about himself and we're still like, I unironically love him and would give him money.

Yeah. I said this about the away founder. I was like, anybody who's going to rally their troops to work hard, over the holiday to make the company successful and keep their jobs and, you know, make it a viable concern. Like, I think that's a great discussion to have. Like, hey, we're going to sacrifice our Christmas so people can get presents under their trees. And then you know what?

Everybody's going to take an extra long July 4th Memorial Day. We're going to have our Christmas in the summer at this company because like Amazon workers who give up their Christmas, like there are Amazon workers who work seasonally for the 60 days before Christmas who give up their Christmas. to get paid a bunch of money to make sure we all get our kids' gifts you know, in the mail. Like they're the modern-day Santa Claus.

Like this happens. Like, Invidia. Like, Jensen Huang is one of the best CEOs of all time. And in the late 90s, they were, Envidia was effed. And the way he fixed it was, and this was all him. He said, they laid off 70% of the company, 7-0.

And they said, the only way we are- When they did that, David, they said, here's who's staying. If your name's not on this list, you're done. Here's who's tag list. And so with the remaining only 30% of the company,

he was like, the only way we're going to survive is if we ship the next generation of our products six months ahead of the competition. So we just lost 70% of the company. And now we were moving at the same pace as the industry.

Now we need to move like 100% faster. And that's the line. Or like, you know, Facebook, remember the Zuckerberg used to do the lockdowns at Facebook? like there'd be some competitive threat or something. Do you imagine a woman founder did a lockdown? Nobody leaves the office.

Somebody would call the cops. Right. Like, nobody leaves the office until this competitive situation is resolved. Like, you know, imagine. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, people don't know about those lockdown situations.

He would, he would say, we're on lockdown for the 30, next 30 days. We're going to beat this competitor. I'm going to be here every day. And if you want to work this company, you need to match my energy. We're moving Cots into the office. Like, Full stop. I mean, people used to, there was an old VC trick.

People don't know this, but they used to, if they were deciding, if they were going to invest, they would just drive to the office on the weekend where they would go, they would just Friday evening, whatever, 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock, just to see how many cars. They would count the cars, you know, in the parking lot. Yeah, this company is crushing it. We might be coming back into that era. That's probably a good thing. I think so.

Well, speaking of capitalism. Oh, is this the Atlassian founder story? Yeah, let's talk about how we feel about the new, like, we know we've had a secret oligarchy running everything for a really long time. And so now we have a whole new class of populist billionaires. Let's go. Take it over. I'm here for it.

Let's go. I love it. So the set of here. If you hated capitalism in the second segment of the show, wait do you get to the third. Wait until you get to the part where now we, I can imagine anybody listens to this show and hates capitalism. For so long, we thought that no help was coming. But it turns out we have an equal and opposite billionaire reaction.

And here we go. Okay, the news that I'm referring to is that Atlassian founder and CEO, Mike Cannon Brooks, successfully took a giant stake in Australia's largest energy company, AGL, which is one of Australia's, if not Australia's single largest carbon emitter. It's like a big coal-burning company. and it was going to spin off its coal-fired power plants and create this lovely little, you know, extra business. And Mike Cannon Brooks stepped in, tried to buy the whole thing, which was rejected, then acquired an 11% stake because he was like, no, no, no, you can't spin off these coal-fired power plants while Australia is on fire 80% of the year. You need to shut them down.

85% of AGL's energy comes from coal. He made this huge bet and the effort to create this spinoff coal-fired company was voted down by the board. He basically, and a bunch of executives are leaving too, including the CEO. This is so brilliant. I mean, if companies are going to behave badly

and their companies and you want to affect change at them, you can complain on Twitter or you can buy the stock. this is hostile takeovers for social good as activism as activism like we I think we should even I would avoid right now right now it's arguably for social good it doesn't necessarily have to right like we've certainly seen these takeovers for this is a various reasons takeovers were traditionally for profit right it was a business decision this is a business this is not a business decision necessary yeah certainly doesn't seem like one it's a tool that could be used for good or for

but it is very, very interesting. Like the board takeover as activism or we'll buy the company. We were saying this last week in semi-seriousness. Like, should we buy Colt? Like, can we do that? Yeah, that was my idea. Would that matter? Yeah.

Yeah. Or your idea, both your idea, too, about, you know, like the NRA, what did you say? They deploy 250 million a year in, in, in. You could just outspend them. Yeah. Yeah, just outspend them. Start a new organization. I'm like, anti-NRA.

Americans for, what do you say. Americans for reasonable gun control. I learned over the weekend, actually, when I was tweeting about this, that there is an organization that already exists in the spirit, because we talked about Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which was this incredibly, you know, effective political organization. There's one called Mom's Demand that's very similar, like founded and say, I mean, we could just overfund the shit out of that.

Let's go, you know, like, let's go. And go to every candidate that the NRA has offered money to. Say, I'll give you $100,000 more than them, but you can't take their money. Yeah. I mean, if he owns 11%. more. Like, I don't want to convince anybody. I just want to buy more politicians than the other guy. Like, if that's a system we have and frankly it seems like this is the billionaire plan, let's go.

My plan is coming complete. See, David, I just hire the journalists from the woke publications. And then I give them the capitalism. And then I'm like, so, Molly, we can talk about this or we can buy something. Or we could do something. Or we could just play some bets, which are also good for us. It's really true. It started with climate.

I was like, I don't have time to change anybody's mind. Now I'm like, I don't know. You know what? Like, I don't, I'm not interested in your, like, just, I just want to stack more politicians on my side. You know, it's, what's great about this also is like, he's a young guy. He's 42. Now last scene is a tremendous company. And I think this is, dare I say, cool as.

It is. Like, what people. I mean, he is so fucking cool, Mike Cannon Brooks. this guy gets J-Cal's coolest F-Award for 2022 because he could have taken his money I don't know how much he spent to do this I'm looking for the number here

but you know this this was not cheap I'm sure whatever he spent on this 11% okay maybe he makes so many makes a minute but there's other people who are buying boats you know yeah there's other people buying a new plane getting the game and and this is like if you think if you're optimizing for joy in your life

you're in Australia as Molly people don't know necessarily but the wildfires in California when they see the wildfires in Australia they're like oh so much more like our wildfires are like really dude put that out it was serious that country was seriously on fire and it's very simple like and they have the Great Barrier Reef

people Australia's a long way away you go to Australia because it's the most amazing ecological journey you can make in the world know, or it's top five, you know, along with Africa and South America, a couple of other places. What he's doing is so cool. And it ultimately could be profitable because if they are making their money off of 85% coal and he says, hey, let's try nuclear, let's try solar, let's do wind, let's do this, let's do that. Maybe this becomes profitable. Yeah.

And so I love the idea of a group of people buying cult and saying, you know what, we're going to have a terms of service. here's our terms of service. Our terms of service, because you can do business things that are good for business. Our terms of services, if you buy this gun, we can't force you to take this course

on gun safety or this license because your state doesn't have it. But in your state, we're just not going to sell the guns. And if your state wants these guns, you need to have a test because we don't want to be party to selling guns in a state,

just like Elon doesn't sell Tesla's in a state where you have to have dealerships because what dealerships add? Nothing. They screw customers. So it's like if you if you don't let me sell direct and you know and fix the car, I'm not selling there. So and then what if cult or some other gun manufacturer said, you know what?

Our minimum age is 25 years old to buy this gun. Okay, yeah, you could sue us, but we're just going to make a minimum age. If you want to buy like a two shot rifle to go hunting and you take the test, yeah, we'll sell it to an 18 year old. But could a, could a gun company put a minimum age to buy their guns or put minimum training. Like if you want to buy software, there are some companies that won't

sell you the software unless you send somebody to training because they know you're going to fail with the software. That's for software. Nobody dies from software. What's cool about capitalism, too. This is one of our major lessons that acquired, which is you get the partners, customers, or whatever you ask for.

This could be a good business decision because if you do this, you're going to attract all the people and I'm sure there are a large number of people who are in the concentric circles of want to own guns or own guns and don't want school shootings to happen anymore.

Like there are a lot of people. 99.1,000 nines. The only person who doesn't agree with that is the school shooter. Like if you make yourself the, if you make yourself the Patagonia of gunmakers. Right.

And then on top of that, you're lobbying. Explain what you mean by that. You're going to do great. People may not know, Molly. So, you know, Patagonia is a clothing wear company, obviously, but they were, I think,

for a very long time, like a B corp. They were a social good organization. They have put into, one of the things they did recently was basically say like, you know, they're the favorite vest maker of bankers and hedge fund traders and Silicon Valley guys. And Patagonia said, hey, we're not going to sell our vests to you anymore, hedge funds, so that you can put your logo on it and have it on top of ours because we think that you, the things that you're doing in society are net negative. So you can't buy our product for that

use. It's hilarious. Right. They were just like, no. That too. They, uh, you know, they make clothing, which is a, uh, the act of doing that is not good for the environment, but they're like, we're going to stand, you know, recycle our clothing. We're going to take back our clothing. We're going to recycle like it's a, the whole thing they stand for is like people who want awesome new clothes, but who also care about the environment. Like, you can totally do this with guns. They were one of the first retailers to set up you out like a resale operation. You could 100% do this with guns and then you pair that with a public policy arm and a lobbying arm. I mean, I 100% agree with you. And this is actually what I like

about the billionaire sort of like board takeover as opposed to philanthropy because, yes, it's agenda setting. But we live in a world where billionaires get to set agendas and they always have. Right. There's nothing new about that. So if they're going to set an agenda, use financial incentives, which are frankly even stronger than philanthropy, which is. like diffused and and has all this like bureaucracy attached to it. I mean, the way that the, what is it, little red little engine is the activist shareholders that took over the Exxon board, it was ultimately a financial argument. And I think that it's sort of the same thing here with AGL, which is like, these are the companies that are in a position to just flip a

fucking switch and blanket this planet with renewable energy. And instead, they're trapped in this kind of like sunk cost fallacy of coal, of coal or oil or natural gas. Coil, yeah. Coil. Coil is killing us. Like, you know, we've seen in examples of this, too. It's not just billionaires who can do this same. Like, billioners can do this, obviously. But like, look at GameStop, right? Like, Reddit can do this too. Yes. Yes. Great transition. Yes. Great transition. Because tomorrow is gamestop earnings. Yeah, we have Elon doing, you know, in his mind, freedom of speech with Twitter. You have Mike doing coal and renewable energies. Like, maybe somebody does guns. You

guys have any other ideas as we wrap this? Like, I mean, I will say, I think Mike, Mike is making Elon's social good play look a little bit lame by comparison. Well, he's a guy. I mean, Elon's also building Tesla. So he doesn't have a, he doesn't, he just said, he's dipped his toe into the environmental world. He could have been all in on it. I, you know, I think this is going to spur a lot of people into action because like if you think about Bezos is $10 billion climate pledge that's going to go to a bunch of donations like would that have been better to just buy that that Seattle arena we were talking about it's climate pledge arena it's the Amazon Amazon paid for it but they called it the climate pledge arena but would that money have been better spent if Amazon was like we're taking a stake in this or

we're spinning up a renewable energy company or we're buying a utility because utilities are like literally just standing in the way of renewable energy rollout or we're buying 10% of 10 utilities you We're just going to buy 10% of 10 utility companies and we're on the board. We're going to put somebody on there. And there'll be somebody there just steering the discussion towards what are our renewable goals here? And can you make more profit than your tax benefit from your philanthropy? Right. Like what are the, how do the incentives start to shake out here?

Well, if you think about that, Molly, if let's say Mike makes a profit on this. Yeah. Let's say he doubles his money. Now he can do it twice. You can do it two more times. Yeah. You know, like if he doubles his money, he can do it again and still keep the main. if he could actually sell his stake in this company and then do it two more times.

Yeah. Totally. It's the old Amazon strategy, which is one of the most brilliant of all time, which is look at your income statement, take all of your biggest expense line items and turn those into revenue streams. Like, that's the way you win. That's how you build AWS. Yeah.

Marketing. Turn your marketing expense. Turn your technological expense into a thing. So I guess we should check in on now this issue. issue of GameStop? Are we going to do that? The results come out tomorrow. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, they're doing earnings tomorrow, which I'm excited to discuss. We can sort of tease ahead to that maybe. But yes, I will tell you that I spent five minutes down the, actually, I spent like 25 minutes because time goes fast down the Twitter rabbit hole of what the GME and AMC apes are doing. And I mean, you like, you dig into that and the call to war and you want to like pound five monster energy drinks and put your life savings into AMC. Like, it's intense.

Yeah, they're intense. They're going for it. I mean, it didn't Melvin Capital go under? I mean, if I was, so they're just like, we're winning already. The short squeezes come. It's like, I would not, I said this to our chat today, like don't sleep on the hedge fund Holy War that is these retail investors.

And it's actually of a piece. It's right. It's all the same thing. Like, we have run out of tools politically, globally. And so now we're using money. And frankly, money is probably the most effective tool. that exists. Money is why this

it's better than bullets. That's for sure. You know, like money is the reason why these school shootings keep happening. Let's be completely honest.

Oh, absolutely. Yes. That's the rules of the game. You should use like just play the, you know, Gurley talks about this all the time. You got to play the game on the field. Like game on the field.

You got to play the game on the field. Absolutely. I mean, if you look at like the NBA, like you used to be able to do hard fouls, then you couldn't. Flopping works. Flopping doesn't work.

You know, like they changed the rules. You got to adjust, right? And if you're going to be a flopper in 2022, you're not going to get the call. And you could even get a call against you for flopping. AMC, my lord, like, talk about a crazy bet to make. These maniacs with what happened with Top Gun and what maybe will happen with Jurassic Park

and the market collapsing, all these shorts, like, I know it's down 50%, but what if they have like this like blockbuster summer? It might be right. And the stock goes up. and movies come back and it's like paradoxical because people are just like you know what?

Streaming is so boring like sitting at home on my iPad watching this shit like I would have much rather watched Obi-Wan Kenobi in a theater if it was in theaters I would have paid for a ticket I would have rather have watched it

with a bunch of Star Wars nerds than watch it alone or you know with my family only I want to take my family out to see Obi-Wan in a movie theater it's really true like we went to Top Gun and people were cheering and by people I mean

me you're screaming All right, you got me hype. I'm going to go see it in theater. I'm going to cheering and clapping. Yeah. Yeah, it's, but it, there is something pretty magical about that. I agree.

It's all, like all the rules are changing. And revolution doesn't look like you think it looks. And I think in this case, it looks like Mike Cannon Brooks. It looks like these retail investors. Like, it's all of a piece and it's a real interesting time to be alive. Yeah. It is. Let's go capitalism.

Who am I even, Jason? Exactly. I got you. Transformation complete. Capital, I mean, I think, you know, one of the things about being a journalist is your powers are muted, you know, like you have the power to all of a sudden you find yourself screaming like, this should change and here's all the information folks and then nothing changes. And you're like, yeah, or it's changing too slowly. And, you know, we can place a bet sometimes and the, and the, and the, maybe the change happens quicker, you know, and in the case of this coal, uh, burning energy company, like, he placed the, bet and now the change happens instantly. Like they were going to spend these coal plants out, they were going to run amok, and now it's like, oh, nope, we're going to, you know, take a different approach.

So placing bets, you know, can work. I really would like to see these stock, stonk people on, you know, the GameStop folks and AMC come up with a noble target. And I think the noble target should be the, I was about to say it. Thank you. if you're listening AMC and GME Stonk Army, I am

appealing to you to own as much of the gun companies as possible and create change through owning their stock. That would be a noble mission. So go ahead. I think, you know, if you look,

you have Ruger, which it makes the pistol I own, the GP100, Ruger is publicly traded. And Smith and Weston, I believe, SWBI. So maybe start buying up those stocks and then start saying like what changes should the gun companies make in terms of the terms of service. We have a terms of service.

You can't open your iPhone. You know, like you can't edit the software. We give you all these things you can't do. You know, you have to buy apps to the app store. You can't jailbreak your phone. Take the same approach with guns. Yeah. You know.

I do want, I'm going to save you from the trolls right now and just say that the mission that they are on. right now is to kill the hedge fund. Which in their mind is noble, yes. Well, yeah, I mean, right? How about an even more noble mission? An even more noble mission, because in this time you've decided. Or your next noble mission. Yeah, next noble mission.

Let's not kill kids for money. Let's not do that. Yeah. Yes. Let's not let money. Yeah. I mean, it's literally the cynicism is so deep. It's staggering.

It's like really, NRA gives Mitt Romney you know, 10, 15 million dollars. The guy was a hedge fund guy, right? Mitt Romney is, is Mitt Romney a billionaire? He was a billionaire or just worth a centimillionaire? Like, can you imagine? He has a lot of money.

He's either a cent a millionaire or a billionaire. Somebody fact check me. Can you imagine the level of cynicism, you're a cent of a millionaire or a billionaire. And for 14 million over 10 years or whatever he got that money from the NRA, whatever it is, a $1.4 million a year. 13 million.

You get 1.3 million a year. Maybe he's been taking it for 20 years. And you, like, it's trump change for you that's like your seventh house, but you sold your soul to vote for these maniacs with zero gun control. Like zero is the goal. Really? Zero? It is funny. Yeah.

Less than cars? Less than cars. Less than cigarettes? If Wall Street bets or Elon or somebody, you know, said we're going to go by Smith and Westner's, like, it would it would start a huge movement. It would change everything. Yeah.

Yeah. Let's go. Let's do it. It's better. It's better than waiting on Congress. Yeah, right. And that company would do great. And that company would do great.

The route. Mitt Romney, net worth, who knows if this is true, it's on the internet. So it's probably not, but 450 million. So literally like 10%

would be 45. It's 3% of his net worth. He could have just paid for that money to be in office himself. You know, it's like, and now he has to be the number one contributing taker of the murdering sociopaths at the NRA. I am a gun owner and I believe in reasonable gun ownership.

It's no longer the same thing, right? There used to be gun holder and now there's like this militarization and this obsessive and it's all been like sort of taken over by white supremacists. It's like a real actual. Owning an AR-15 and selling that to people who are deranged. Like, that's a, that is not the same thing. Yeah, I mean, and also 18 years old. Like, really?

18? It's just like, maybe 18 for one gun. Maybe like a rifle. And if you want to use that gun, like, what is it when your kids drive? Like, for the first two or three years, you have to have a driver's license and it's only, it's a learner's permit. You got to have somebody in the car. It's only during the day. Maybe you're not allowed on the highways until you get the second one, right?

It was like a two-phase thing in New York. When I grew up, you could be on like local streets, then the highway. Like, just reasonable. stuff. Like, not crazy stuff. Like a pilot's license. Like you have to have a certain amount of hours at a gun range before you, you know, like, yeah.

And then when you're at the gun range, you have to talk to somebody at the front desk. And maybe they could red flag you if they think you're nuts. I talk to somebody's a friend of mine who's going to make a red flag independent red flag database where anybody is going to be able to report somebody. Then they're going to pay for. The background, they're going to check that the person reporting it is a real person. And then they're going to spend the money to let local authorities know.

They're going to make their own red flag database. And I was like, this is a brilliant idea. Can you imagine if it works? I was like, I'll turn into that. It's even better, though, just to own the gun companies. Like, go right to the source. Oh, absolutely. I mean, what's the market?

Compare it with, data. Pair it with like proper lobbying and marketing, frankly, which not everybody's always great at. And then just buy them. Yeah. Become the majority shareholders in every, Republic gun company. By the way,

Brueger's worth $1.2 billion. Like, $120. It's nothing. It's $120 million. Like, we could raise that on this show,

probably. We just say to everybody, like, anybody want to chip in with us and buy Ruger. I mean, Smith and Weston's got to be worth more. Ruger's a smaller company,

I would guess. But, yeah, let's see what Smith and Weston's worth. Here we go. SWBI is worth. No. Smith and We're worth $709 million. I mean,

for God's take it out of here. Yeah, and these things trade like, I love this. At a 3 PE, the ratio is 3. It's a 3 PE ratio. Ruger's PE is 8. Economic warfare people.

Smith and Wesson is who we're talking about. You could make so much money doing this too. You could make so much money. I bet these stocks are depressed because everybody's like, oh, all this craziness going on. If you buy them and you're like, no, we're going to embrace. And ironically, the stock goes up every time there's a shooting because we're the worst country on Earth. But it goes up to three times. priced earnings?

Like, you can do better. These are depressed. Patagonia of gun companies is a thing. Hmm. Okay, here we go.

I got some... How do I mobilize a group, like a syndicate of sorts to buy 10% of Smith and West and get a board seat on Smith and Western? There were... For the syndicate

you had like... 10,000-ish... High net worth individuals who wanted to collect. We put $70 million in buying. Very impactful group chat. Yeah. We've got to figure that out.

All right, everybody. Thanks, David, for coming on show. Follow David on Twitter. Go search for Acquired, listen to Acquired. And, yeah, more shows to come. Acquired FM on Twitter. Thanks for coming on. And we'll see everybody next time.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Great show, everybody.