This Week in Startups - OpenSea admits employee was front-running featured NFTs + Goldbelly CEO Joe Ariel on food e-commerce | E1283

Episode Date: September 15, 2021

First, Jason breaks down NFT platform OpenSea admitting one of their employees was front-running featured items (2:02). Could this tip off the SEC that NFTs might be securities rather than collectibles (12:01)? Then, Jason talks to Producer Rachel about TWiST Meetups (18:24). Finally, Goldbelly CEO Joe Ariel joins to talk about his high-end food marketplace, being the first mover in a blossoming category, the food e-commerce market & more. (30:15)

Okay, everybody, we got an amazing this week in startups for you today. Right out of the bat. Leading NFT platform OpenC just admitted that an employee was front running, featured drops on their platform. Oh my God, what a mess. I unpack it all. I've been telling you this fraud in this phase. And now we have confirmation.

The fraud is inside the house. Second, I have producer Rachel on the program to announce the first three cities that will be hosting this week in startup founder meetups. That's right. We're going to start our founder meetups again. We assume we're going to get out of this COVID thing, and we want to start to get together in person with fans of the show. It's for founders and by founders. That's our second item.

And third up, I interview the founder of Goldbelly. One of my favorite sites, I just ordered some Peking Duck from Red Farm in New York. One of my favorite restaurants, it's going to be coming in two weeks. And you know Gold Belly. You can order amazing dishes from amazing restaurants and purveyors from all over the country. It's an amazing story of a founder who could not get fundraiser. was laughed out of the room, and now he is the one laughing at the investors who passed on him. Stick with us. It's an amazing episode.

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Okay, in our first story, oh my lord, I've been warning you guys that this would happen. Any system that can be corrupted will be corrupted and I told you that NFTs and crypto were full of people gaming the system and that you would be the ones who would be the bagholders. You would be the ones being manipulated. Well, leading NFT platform OpenC, SEA, for those of you wondering, just admitted that an employee was front-running feature drops with a secret Ethereum account before the public had access. So what this means is, NFTs, if you're unaware, non-fungible tokens are like collecting cards.

That's what the board monkey, board ape, yacht club and Top Shop and all this stuff is about. I believe NFTs are a really interesting crypto use case. I am not anti-crypto or anti-NFT. I'm anti-market manipulation. I'm anti-people breaking the rules. And here we now have confirmation of people breaking the rules. And not just a rogue bad actor. This isn't the mafia in, you know, Russian mafia or Russian hacking groups.

This isn't Chinese, you know, black ops. Nope. Literally, this is somebody who worked at OpenC. So they have featured NFTs that are listed on the front page of the website. As you know, OpenC, Devin Finzer was on episode 1255 back in July if you want to learn more about OpenC. And Devin was a great guest. And I think this is a really great platform. I think what they're doing is really interesting.

And they've recently been rewarded. They've raised over 100 million. And they were recently valued at $1.5 billion in their Series B. And there's a lot of issues with NFTs. So Wednesday morning, September 15th. and see, published a blog post, admitting that one of their employees was involved in front-running popular NFT drops. A drop means a launch. It's just a fancy hipster way of saying the release of something. So when they are going to release them, they call it a drop, it gets everybody

excited, it creates FOMO, it creates a marketplace. They did not fire the employee on the spot, nor did they name the employee in question. Instead, they said, quote, we are taking this very seriously and are conducting an immediate and thorough review of this incident so that we have a full understanding of the facts and additional steps we need to take. They also implemented two policies regarding employee conduct. OpenCT members may not buy or sell from collections or creators while we are featuring or promoting them, i.e. on our homepage. OpenC. Team members are prohibited from using confidential information to purchase or sell any NFTs, whether available on the OpenC platform or not. Okay. This is insane that they did not have a policy.

This is insane that they did not fire the person, and it's insane that they haven't taken legal action against the person. This is an existential moment for OpenC. You need to drop the hammer immediately and violently when people do something this corrupt. They absolutely have to take legal action against this employee. They have to sue the employee. Yes, that sounds crazy. So according to a report by the Block Crypto, the employee in question is allegedly OpenC's head of product, Nate Chastain.

Now, I would normally not say the name of the person, but since it's already out there and everybody's talking about it in the news, it's not like me not saying it changes anything. The front running was uncovered by numerous Twitter users who traced Chastain's transactional data using a site called EtherScan.io. OpenC is built on Ethereum

and utilized a smart contract, so all transactions are recorded and searchable. he purchased cyberpunk number 3501 for $40,000 in Ethereum about seven months ago, according to the block crypto. This identifies his main Ethereum wallet, which Twitter user 0XNGMI used to trace transactions to another secret wallet where it was flipping NFTs, according to the Twitter user. Chastain was flipping NFTs for 10x returns in under 10 minutes and sending the profits back to his original account.

Okay. This is where the immutable blog. blockchain comes in handy. This idiot, I mean, not only is what he's doing, criminal, unethical, immoral, it's also stupid. I mean, this is one of the great things about criminals. If he's actually a criminal, you know, whoever did this, let's assume he's innocent for now, whoever would do this is a moral. And this is why criminals get caught so often because they do something so stupid. Why wouldn't he create 10 different accounts, use other coins, coins, wash trade them, et cetera, until the point at which you couldn't trace them back to him.

So, I mean, really, as far as frauds go, this one was caught. But to me, this means that the Department of Justice and the SEC now need to do a full investigation. That's right. You can't say these things aren't securities. if your own employees aren't flipping them 10x to make a profit. And do you know what that means? That means you're manipulating your own customers for your profit. Now, I have told you scenarios over and over again

of how people might manipulate the system. This one, I never used because I thought it's kind of obvious that insiders at a company could do this. But let's pause for a second. And let's think of another scenario in which you, as somebody who's an enthusiast in the space could get screwed. Okay, I'm starting a crypto project. Let's call it bored bulldogs.

You know, board bulldog private jet club. The board bulldog private jet club by J-Cal. Now, I make a thousand bulldogs. I go to my friends. I say, hey, besties. Create a bunch of Ethereum wallets. I'm going to do a random auction. It's not going to be random.

or I'm going to do it on this day and I'm going to announce it 10 minutes after. So I'll announce it 10 minutes late. Nobody will notice. But you'll be sitting there with your finger on the trigger when they launch. I want you all to buy these. But more importantly, I want you all to buy them and then buy each others and flip them. Now, you, the sucker, sees this trending. Everybody's sharing it.

You see all the wallets doing this and you think, wow, it's going up. It's going up. There's volume. There's trading. I need to jump in here and grab one of these. so I can flip it and make money and you buy it and you are what's called in the business the bag holder.

So there you have it, folks. It's really that easy. Now, if I describe that, and it's such an easy, grift, fraud, scheme, scam for me to come up with off the top of my head, you can probably come up with 10. Go ahead in the comments if you're watching the live stream.

Tell me 10 different ways you would perpetrate a scam. Well, it's up to the plastic. open-see to make sure this stuff doesn't happen. It's up to Topshop, Dapper Labs, and the players here. But all of this is built on open, you know, decentralized technology, which means it's very hard to stop these kind of things. And when they're racing like this, what is the incentive of OpenCe to not take their commission on every one of these and to not build up their market cap? Now, here is something that, you know, I hate to bring up, I don't want to be a hater or portrayed as a hater here. What if a company had this happening not just with one person, but two or three employees or people who are partners in the company or investors in the company, i.e. stakeholders. So what happens if it's not just their head of product, but one other person in customer support? And what if it's somebody who's an investor or an angel or a partner company? Okay, now you've got four or five people doing this.

And what happens if people inside the company know this, but they don't take action and disclose it? And then they raise money. And people invest dollars into the company. You've now, on top of doing whatever unethical behavior, we want to categorize this as, right? It's some kind of a fraud. Why or fraud comes to mind in this manipulation. But now you just committed securities fraud, right? Committed securities fraud.

And you go to jail for that. And it's not a joke, right? We have Elizabeth Holmes right now on trial. She is, you know, facing serious jail time for wire fraud and security fraud and all that kind of good stuff. How much time and money do you spend integrating a bunch of different software products together at your company? Let me guess. Way too much time. Well, Odu is here to help. Odo is a suite of business apps that runs your entire company on one platform. They'll streamline your workflow by bringing all of that information together. Plus, Odu's integrations eliminate repetitive tasks and data entry. If you only need two or three apps to optimize your workflow, that's all you pay for.

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they faced a class action lawsuit back in May, which alleged they violated Securities Law by selling NFTs as unregistered securities. So all of this bad behavior or alleged bad behavior, which seems directionally correct, but let's leave room here, since it's alleged, everybody gets their day in court. Let's leave room here that maybe there's some giant misunderstanding. Seems unlikely. But it's one of the great things about our legal system is that you have your day in court. This means that the SEC now has a clear path to say this is a security.

So this dip shit if in fact this actually occurred and this isn't some setup and, you know, who knows, there's so much anonymity and so many spoof accounts here. We don't know all the details. So let's wait and see. But if this is in fact true, this could give the SEC a clear path to say, you know what, NFT folks, their securities. People are trading them to make a profit. Yeah, I know that they are collectibles and there are people trading, kind of. comic books and beanie babies and all that stuff and they're not securities, they're memorabilia. But based on our assessment of this and the way they're trading, we're going to put them in

the bucket of securities. I kind of feel like they're securities more than they are collectibles because they don't serve a real purpose in the real world. I know some people who are digital natives will feel offended by that. But because of the velocity of the value of these and that the velocity and the value of these does not match reality. In other words, it's not a limited edition Superman that came out 70 years ago. It is not a Ferrari or a Mustang from 1965.

These things are digital assets that were created moments ago. And even Beeple's, you know, NFT, you could at least say, listen, that's an actual known artist who is put in years to master their craft. That one definitely has some provenance and some history. and there's some track record here to say, hey, it's by an actual real artist, so it should be. So Chastain might have incriminated himself on Twitter back in early August after a Twitter user called him out for jumping the line on an NFT featured on NF OpenC's front page by 30 minutes. Jerseyborn. Dot Ethereum had a tweet.

Looks like Nate from OS, I assume that means OpenC, had the jump on everyone else. Nate, I just wanted to secure one of these. before they all disappeared TBH. So, you know, this is the thing I said the other day on the program is that a lot of folks who are in crypto are neophytes. They're inexperienced. They could be teenagers. They could be adults who've never traded stocks.

They don't understand securities. And there's nothing wrong with that. But I remember when people told them you're going to have to pay capital gains. A lot of them, you know, on different message boards were like, why would I pay that? It's not real money. It's like, well, to NASA said and you had a gain. It doesn't matter. it's a gain and you have to pay capital gains tax on gains.

You don't get to have a gain in capital without paying. And they're like, well, I've been flipping things like 20 times. How am I supposed to pay my taxes? And it's like, like everybody else, you're going to have to record the profit or loss on each one of those and build a spreadsheet and then tally it up. And at the end of the year, say, here's my profit and loss across all of these securities, shares, etc.

So if OpenC's head of product was involved of this, how many of the other 50 employees were doing the same thing?

That's immediately where your mind goes. It's immediately where your mind goes. And when did the CEO know? When did the board know?

What insurance do they have? What class actions are to come? And did they commit securities fraud? Because if they knew about this and then

they raised money and it wasn't disclosed, or if let's say, you know, the person who is in question here own shares in this company and they're profiting this way. They're profiting two different ways

and they know they're committing fraud and they are a shareholder. If they're involved in the fundraising in any way, my lord, you know, they're basically running a giant securities fraud here. And that's the worst potential here. This is why I tell people, you must, must, when you're the leader of a company, when you're the leader of the company, you have to set the ethical and moral compass of the company so dramatically that people do not break it. How do I know this? Well, when I was running in gadget and auto blog and the weblogs, Inc. properties, we had an Engadget freelancer, who we fired, go and get a bunch of products, you know, gadgets, electronics for review, even after we fired him. How did we find this out? Well, because Samsung and Motorola and all

these people were like, hey, can you send back the review unit that Joe Dipsch got from us in February? And we're like, it doesn't work here anymore. And they're like, well, we sent him a $2,000 laptop. We're like, well, you have to talk to him. And I made it very clear to anybody. If I find out that you accepted a $5 Amazon card, you will be fired on the spot. And if there is any potential legal action we can take, we will pursue it. If you steal from the company, if you take a bribe, even if you don't think it's a bribe, we will fire you immediately. And when somebody calls and wants a reference for you, we're going to say, we cannot give a reference. That's it. And that's deadly. So never do anything stupid. You're getting paid a salary. You have equity in this company. If somebody in a senior

position like this, I would say they own, if let's say they were on the founding team, if they were on the founding team and they were headed the product, they own 1% on the company. Maybe they own 5%. minimum they own 50 basis points. 1% of $1 billion is $10 million, 1.5 billion, 1% is 15 million. So to make a quick 50 or $100,000 flipping NFTs, if this was a senior employee, can you imagine $10, 15 million in equity up in flames? So don't commit fraud, folks. That's the bottom line.

And actually, it's interesting in our Slack. I told Sir Charles, he reminds me that I have. I asked him to refuse a restaurant gift card from an accelerator founder. And I told him, I would fire him if he took it. And if he needs to go to a restaurant, I will buy him dinner. Of course. All right. Next up on the program, I want to make a big announcement.

When we started the program in the first 100 episodes, we used to do something called the This Week in Startups Meetup. We would have one city like Berlin, present three startups. They would have a meetup. And they would go up against Stockholm or, South Korea or Sydney or Melbourne. And we had all these communities growing. And you know what?

I got busy. And I forgot that we came up with this great idea. And I was like, you know what? The fans want to do stuff. We want to build community. The Slack instance we created became just a just spam central. And I was like, you know what? I really like those meetup things as a way for the fans to get together and for startup

founders to get together. My friend Scott Haferman started the company Meetup.com. And I was like, you know what? it's time for this week in startups, meetups again. So if you go to this week and startups.com slash meetups, so I went to the Slack

and I said, listen, the purpose of the Slack is to talk about the show and to coordinate meetups. And we got rid of like 90% of the rooms that people were spamming. We kept just a couple books and the cities. And the reason I wanted to keep books

is because it seemed like that was something when we talked about books, nobody spammed it, although we did have some people come in and like, read my buck. We also had all these cities, and those were the channels on our Slack, which is this week in startups.com slash slack. The cities were actually kind of doing interesting conversations. So I created that Slack because I wanted interesting conversations, not marketing and spam.

So now it has narrowed the focus, and we're going to rebuild it, and it's doing pretty good. I asked Rachel to manage, along with Jackie, the original producer of the show, these meetups. Rachel, I gave you some basic ideas here. Which cities are we going to do first? The first three cities are going to be Chicago, London, and New York. Got it. Chicago, Shytown, London, and New York, my hometown. Perfect.

Those are three great cities, and we want to get these right. Now, I came up with an idea, which was I want people to prove it, because my number one concern is that these are done in a way that's, you know, got some level of quality and that's for the fans and that represents the brand well. So I came up with a rule, which was, hey, I only want the coordinators in these cities to be startup founders. So you can apply to be a coordinator. You have to have a minimum of three. And I think I said a maximum of seven or ten could be on the organizing body. Is that right? Yep. Between three and seven founders. Perfect. And the reason we did that for people who are wondering is once you have a lawyer or an accountant or a headhunt or a real estate broker,

the whole gestalt, if you will, the entire direction of these things will start to go in a marketing kind of direction for them to get customers. What I wanted to be is founders who founders of startups who listen to this week in startups talking about startups and how to build startups. So it's about startups. Now, you did a call with the London, the members of the community in London who were interested in doing this. How did that call? call go? It went super amazing. And actually, London's not the only city that is doing really well. New York and Chicago are also both doing amazing. London is planning, I believe, on doing their event later in October. And they're already really excited to hear more about the third event so they can

start having content. But yeah, it went really, really well. And I was happy that Jackie was able to hop on that call with me. Great. Now, explain the gamification I added the third. three missions in order to have people who are on these organizing bodies prove to us they're serious and they're going to represent us well. Of course. So for the first meeting, I was telling the founders, it's basically just to get comfortable. It's around 10 founders to meet up. Everybody pays their own way, have a meal, have a drink, grab a coffee. It's really just to have everybody get to know each other. And it's obviously, because it's only around 10 people, it'll probably mostly only consist of those founders planning these events. Meetup number two is a little bit bigger

around 25 to 50 people you said. Some examples you gave us were dim sum, pizza, go to a bar and network. And obviously, that is a lot more than the founders that are helping plan. And the big thing for that is to network. And then for meetup number three, that's the really fun one. And that's when they get to host content. And that's probably when they'll have to start talking to you a little bit more, because then we're talking about 50 to 100 founders, uh, hosting program. You can even jump in and call in. Um, you probably obviously won't go there, but you'll be calling in, which is going to be kind of cool for them. Um, and a bunch of the cities have recommended about what different kind of content they'd like there already. So I'm excited for that one. Fantastic. Yes. So what we're

going to do is we're going to have them do two things before we allow them to do actual content. after this week in startups meetup, because I have concerns like people are going to be serious about this and do it in a way that is, you know, just in line with our brand. So step one, have breakfast with 10 friends, you know, three to seven people on the steering committee and everybody invite an extra person. Just go find a place for breakfast. You go Dutch. Everybody splits the bill.

You don't have to market it. You just take a picture and Instagram. You tag us in it. We'll retweet you and we'll put some of those. So it's important that they just do a little social media on it. Rachel, I think would be cool, then we can amplify it and link to their page this week in startups.com slash events slash London slash whatever. So we'll make a URL for each city.

That'll go directly to our notion page on that city and people can take it from there. And in the second event, you just find a bar that fits 25 people. You may want to give them a heads up. You're coming. Maybe they want to put out some appetizers or whatever, but everybody just pays their own way. Or it could be a large cafe if you think they can handle it. you can maybe have name tags and that one you're going to have a sign up form. The way we'll do it, Rachel, is we will control the sign up form with them.

So we have a, you know, like a type form or a survey monkey account or maybe a Google sheet. We'll share the sheet with them. We'll have a copy of the sheet. So we'll collect those email addresses for our list and we'll let them, you know, email to that list. We have to think about that because we don't want people to then use these lists to span people. But the idea here is to build up some trust. So we probably want to maintain that list and make sure people, don't get spammed or use it for

the first purposes. And then on the third one, when it gets big, then we'll have them pitch us on the content they want to do. And if it goes well, we'll say, okay. And in the fourth mission, we will have a sponsor. So mission four is, find a sponsor. And when they have a sponsor, we'll let them, you know, basically it'll become like a little mini franchise

and we'll have to come up with some rules of the road. But I think either we'll let them collect the money themselves or will collect the money and give them the net or something like that. We don't see this as a money-making thing, but we do not want this to turn into something where

people who are running it lose money doing it. But we also don't want it to become something where they're using the audience to make too much money. In other words, we want it to kind of be cash neutral. I mean, if there was an extra 500 bucks and went towards securing the next space,

I wouldn't feel so bad about it. So it's kind of like TEDx. some rules of the road. All right. Did you talk to Chicago and New York yet or do you have calls set up, Zoom calls for them? I already talked to them. And the New York one is actually already set up for their first meeting. They decided to rush things a little bit due to COVID.

They weren't sure how things were going to be. And they actually do have a little form set up for everyone to RSVP. Unfortunately, though, there are only 10 spots available because they had to make a reservation. Just be COVID safe. That's what they decided to do. And that's perfectly fine. I think already seven people are a RSVP to that. But if you want, anybody on here wants to rush over, check out and apply for that.

We'll be taking the first 10 people that fill out that forum. And Chicago, I did talk to them. And I connected all the founders that are willing to meet up with the event. And so far, I haven't heard back from them. But I only talk to them on Monday. So I'm sure by the end of the week, something will be sorted out for them. Yeah. And I think if it works and these three go well, we don't have any,

shenanigans or Adani Brooke doesn't break out at the event, we can maybe add one a month, right? And I think, you know, it's nice. We've got two in America, one in Europe. We'd love to have one in Australia, which I love to go to. We'd love to have one in Tokyo or South Korea again, maybe South America. So great job, Rachel. If you want to be a coordinator on this, we are only coordinating it through the Slack.

So go to this week in Startups.com slash Slack. Slack and Notion. It makes things really easy. those are the two places. Don't start flooding us with emails. Don't start hitting us up on Twitter. I mean, I guess you could, but let's try to keep it tight. So it doesn't become too much work for Rachel.

Any other ideas come up during this, or you have any other ideas that you think would make this awesome? So far, I feel like a lot of people just want to add their cities. I've seen a lot of people. So far, two people have reached out from Boston, D.C. and Austin. So at this point, we're just waiting for one more person from those three cities to tag. tag along. So that's really exciting. So if anybody's from those three cities, I have two other

founders that would really like to talk to you. Yeah, but those Boston folks are really annoying. I think my God. I mean, they have good pizza. I'll be honest. Like the Chicago pizza, the deep dish, I'm not impressed. But the Boston stuff, I was pretty impressed at the Boston pizza. I'm going to make my decision on which ones to go to in person when they get to level three, mission three, just strictly based on food. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm on a diet right now. I think that's a good. That's a good one. Yeah, I mean, I think depending on which, you know, epic restaurant we can go to,

I'll pick you based on that. Well, and sure enough, next up on the program is Goldbelly CEO talking about all the great food in the world. So great job. Rachel. And let's go to our interview with the CEO of Goldbeil. Before we get to the ad read, I want you to go to LinkedIn.com slash unicorn and post your first job for free at LinkedIn jobs. That's right. A free job posting from LinkedIn Jobs, your founders, you're running a company you need to get talented there to help you out because your company is growing so fast and you're so busy.

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All right. Next up on the program is the founder of a website I am absolutely obsessed with. That website is for foodies and for people who like local food from places like Chicago and New York and Brooklyn and L.A. And you probably know about it because you've probably gotten a gift basket from it. And my good friends know to get me barbecue or bagels or pizza or the things I like to eat that are probably the reason I'm on a diet now trying to eat seven salads a week. The website is called goldbelly. Goldbelly.com.

The founder is Joe Ariel and he is a New Yorker. And he got to be a marketing intern at my New York Knicks from 1998 to 2000. Welcome to the program. Excited to be here. I'm doing well. Congratulations on the success. I got to ask you, though, oh, my Lord, you got to be there for the 1999. Shortened, what was that, a 50 game lockout season, if I remember correctly, where the Knicks were the eighth seed and beat all comers in the Eastern Conference.

behind Marcus Camby, Alan Houston, Larry Johnson, and a bit of a rebel of a small forward named Latrell Sprewell, who just absolutely had a renaissance in New York. I was there for all those games. And what was that like, washing our Knicks and the eight seed go on? And they were beaten by the spurs, but it was a great run. It was insane. You remember the lockout. But do you remember like halfway through the season, I think it was like the first or second year that Dolan took over and they sucked.

So they cleaned house and it was either do we fire Van Gundy or Ernie Grunfeld who was basically my boss his boss. Yeah. And they fired Grunfeld. Yep. And then after that they kind of went on a little bit of a run to make it

into the playoffs. And that's when it got insane. And I was basically an intern had not finished college yet. And the lockout ended. And they're like, hey, full-time position. We need you. So I went to my parents and I'm like, listen, I have this opportunity.

But I need to push off college. And they were like, absolutely, you should do that. And yeah, almost a full miracle year, but pretty incredible. I mean, it was bonkers to think that. an AC could ever hit those notes, right? I mean, just crazy. Hey, by the way, funny story that I've actually never told. So the first round of that series,

I was basically left at home when the Knicks played Miami. And it was when that Will Smith song going to Miami. Remember that song? Oh, right. Yes. And so I had this flash of brilliance and decided to go into a recording studio. I wrote a rap about why the heat suck and the Knicks are going to kick their ass. Yeah, the heat do suck. And so I wrote this song. Next thing you know, it was number one most requested on Z-100 and Hot 97. And by the way, my bosses were pissed because they had no idea

that I had done that. But anyway. Oh, my lord. I mean, we beat Miami and we beat Atlanta. Indiana. And then we beat Indiana. And what a series of events. Each of those series, super notable. We went in five games, four games, six games. And then, of course, a poor showing in the finals versus, my gosh, a pretty amazing Spurs team. But, yeah, Alan Houston, the Charles Bielwell, Marcus Cambie, Charlie Ward. Camby went nuts. Camby was just unbelievable in that series that the monster dunks that he had were just unbelievable. And of course, Miami was the, you know, the Eastern Conference champions. And we took them apart. as the Knicks.

The Allen Houston shot. You remember that? I mean, he drives and he gives the fist pump, but I mean, it bounces off the back of the rim, hits the back of the, hits the backward, the back of the rim, the front of the rim, and then back in. I mean, it was a little bit of a shaky one, but, I mean, and he is a, he was the three-point specialist of the league before, you know, long before Steph Curry. And, you know, not known exactly for his drives as a shooting guard, but, man, he drove the lane

and laid it in. He did. The rest is history. We deserve a break. Knicks fans deserve a break. That was like our only break. After Charles Smith with the layups, man, we definitely deserve a break.

And John Starks. Don't forget John Starks, two for 18. John Starks got us to that Houston series, and if he had a bad game in that one game, he got us there. And I'm very proud of the Knicks of that era. Two finals appearances,

perennial, conference champions, and they left it all out the floor. And you've got to be happy with last season with Julius Randall, D. Rose, um, yeah, RJ Randall. I mean, we got a, we got some ballers on this. We have something, we have something positive to be excited about. Let's put it that way. I cannot wait. I came for the two playoff games in New York and it was wonderful. Uh, we split them, but I can't wait to come back and see some more next basketball. And I think 20 days, I think we're 20 days away. So how did you get the idea for Goldbelly? This seems like,

one of the most difficult, craziest ideas to go after because sending perishable food, having to charge a massive premium on it and getting restaurants to pay attention to this, sounds like a terrible idea and just absurdly hard. I mean, it sounds delightful for me to get canishes and pizza from where I want to eat them. But what is the origin story here? Because this seems like one of the most difficult, unfundable businesses I've heard of in 10 years investing in startups. You sound like all the New York VCs in 2012.

Yeah. I mean, I believe in it, but I mean, it does sound like a crazy bet. What was the origin here? How did you come up with the idea? And then how did they respond to it? And why did they tell you you were going to fail? Yeah. So I think so much of what we do comes down to really food, love,

and the emotional power of food. I think, you know, if we traced back eight years ago, give or take, basically I was just thinking about what the future of food is as far as the internet goes. And, you know, I went to college in Nashville, as you mentioned earlier, from New York originally. I was back in New York after college. And the one thing that I wanted that I couldn't get were my favorite foods from Nashville.

Oh, interesting. It wasn't the other way. I'm talking about hot chicken. It needed your New York food in Nashville. It was coming back from Nashville. did you need from Nashville? It was coming back. So I went to Nashville and as a kid from New York to be exposed to this whole new world of food that I had no idea about. It was like I got placed on foodie Mars

and explored hot chicken at places like princes and eventually hadty bees and bolton's barbecue but with dry rub without barbecue sauce from places like rendezvous, something called meat and threes, which are basically you get some barbecue and a couple of just classic southern side dishes and then buttermilk biscuits and a country ham breakfast from places like Loveless Cafe, the most delicious food on planet Earth. And I'm here in New York City and can't experience any of those authentic real foods from the actual places and would literally pay anything for that. And so I crave that, called in some favors to some restaurants, they ship me these boxes with instructions how to reheat the food.

But really the key moment was the emotional power that I felt when I opened that box and I was transported to a different time and place when I saw the menus and I smelled the smells. And I think everything traces back to that magic. We're not trying to get you the cheapest food. We're not trying to get you the fastest food. But we're trying to make food dreams come true and make. and make these food experiences,

the epicenter of celebrations, of nostalgia, of key moments in life. And I think the more I would ask around to different folks from different places, everybody had a story of a different food that they would pay anything for. Buffalo wings from Buffalo, Anchor Bar, the place that invented them,

Philly cheese steaks from Pats. The list goes on and on. Deep dish pizza from Chicago. Stone crab from down in Miami. New York. Not so much, I have to say, the Chicago Deep Dish. Yeah. For me, overrated.

Yeah? But I don't know about this natural hot chicken. I mean, I haven't had that, and that looks just banging. Oh, my Lord. Well, do you eat spicy food? I'm not like a crazy spicy food person, but I will eat spicy food. And, man, that looks just incredibly tight. What would you do with an extra 15 hours every week for a lot of leaders?

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rise up and lead well. So you get some of those restaurants to do it. And what do you learn about restaurant tours and their willingness to do this? Was it that you made a high margin and the emotion of being able to have this experience was worth the extra 50 bucks or 25 bucks it takes to ship? Is that what this comes down to?

That's the insight? So I think it's a few things. So in the early days, Listen, most restaurateurs were like, you know, no, like, this is a ridiculous thing. I'm not going to try. But then there were many that were like, you know what? Kid, this is a crazy idea. But if you're creating a place where the best foods from all across the country can be ordered

and we're one of those, we'll give it a shot and see where it goes. And so I think like for the restaurants, this is incremental revenue, right? Like this is something that's not eating away at anything there. doing. It's something that's creating a totally new revenue stream. And the way we think about it, we've created the first platform for national food e-commerce, where before us, if you wanted to order something online shipped across the country, you're ordering Omaha steaks or Harry and David Pears, these kind of like soulless, not really exciting things. So to create a platform where a small restaurant can enter an e-commerce economy that they're not a part of at all, like they've

don't do any business outside of a five-mile radius. That was interesting to some of them. It has to be like a legendary dish, as you've said before. It can't be like I'm just Joe Schmo or Jane Doe with my cupcakes. It's got to be Magnolia, right? And I see you got the bread pudding from Magnolia Bakery, which is just unbelievably criminal. I had that when I was in New York the last time. I didn't even know that existed.

And now I'm looking at it's for sale there. When you pitch this idea to VCs, obviously they're going to, going to say no because they're going to think this is too hard. It's low margin. It's manual. It's not software, I'm guessing. And did you get anybody to say yes? You had to fund it yourself. Yeah, it was really tough in the early going, especially like in the New York, VC community. There just there wasn't much love there. I funded it myself, a couple of friends and family. And then I think our big break on that side was Y Combinator. And in 2013, end of 2012, we applied.

It was the big storm in New York. And basically, like I was bored and just fired away an application. My co-founders had no idea that I did that. We got invited out for the interview. And Y Combinator, Paul Graham and some of the partners there, you know, love kind of those crazy ideas that seem too crazy. and know that there's a lot of potential there. And so they gave us a shot.

And I think that was the first big break. And as a team, we actually moved out to Silicon Valley for the program and stuck around for four years. It's one of the great things about accelerators is they can take more chances. And founders who are taking risk, doing really risky things are like, you know what? I'm giving up 6%, 7% for 100 or 150K. but my idea is crazy. Nobody wants to fund it. Screw it. If I get some validation here, if I can build some consensus around this and learn, you know, it could be just the type of transformative thing that actually gets people to embrace it.

I've had so many companies come through our accelerator as well that were unfundable before we had them in the accelerator. And then suddenly they get through the accelerator. They learn how to pitch the product. They hear all the objections. Maybe the product, you know, gets. It's refined a little bit, and then all of a sudden, you just need one investor, right? I mean, you only need one, and then you're off to the races.

What product broke out first? There must have been a product that just sold out, captured the press's imagination, and just went crazy for you. What was it? Well, you know, I don't know that there's one, but I think, you know, part of our magic is the curation of the site, as you kind of touched on a little bit earlier. And, you know, for the first, call it, four or five years, everything was kind of handpicked and literally went through my belly before it got on the site.

And it was food. And that's why I put out 25 pounds. I'm working on getting it off. But so it's iconic foods from around the country. It's the most loved foods. It's not every food from every maker. It's the most cherished and signature items. And it's foods that travel well and taste delicious.

So I think we captured people's imagination. imagination when, you know, somebody in San Francisco could get New York bagels when they've been complaining about how shitty the bagels are, you know, for decades. The same thing is, you know, New York pizza or, you know, you name the regional dish, there's these locally legendary shops that just do it better from the places that originated them, places that perfected them. And so I think, you know, everything from New York bagels and New York deli to every kind of. a barbecue, you know, barbecue is like the regional American food. And we have these great barbecue makers from the four capitals of barbecue. Yeah, somebody sent me a brisket. You know, Carolina, Memphis. Somebody sent me a sex as brisket for my birthday last year from Goldbelly. I can't remember which one it was from, but it was dynamite.

And I smoked my own brisket and I was super impressed. I mean, Joe's pizza was one of the canonical examples of like people wanting to ship stuff. Did you ever get them on the platform back in the day? I know people. Yeah, we've worked with them. Yeah, we worked with them for years. And Defara is another, like, great New York institution that we ship. Now, what happens when people figure out how to do this?

You teach them how to do it. You prove there's a market. Do they then just leave and do it themselves? Are people encroaching on the business as like Uber Eats or Postmates starting to try to get in on this? Amazon? or are you still like the first option for people? Yeah, I think, you know, our, the volume of our sales is pretty substantial right now for food makers. You know, we have many, many partners that do millions of sales.

Millions of dollars a year. Millions of dollars in sales. What's the top number? And then, you know, we have. I'm not saying the name of the thing. Who made the most last year or who was making the most this year? like most in a month. 10 million a year,

five million a year, three million a year. Obviously, we can't disclose who, but it's in the, yeah, it's closer to the top. Like $10 million worth of the product going through one vendor on there?

That's right. And what's your take? You guys take 25% or something or is it negotiated or is it a flat rate? What is it? How does that work? Yeah, it's negotiated. So Jason, one of the things you have to realize

is so we've created this market, you know, 98% of our partners have never shipped anything. before we worked with them on doing it. And so there's this whole innovation stack that comes with that. And it's everything from managing the shipping and logistics, managing the technology and the dashboards, obviously bringing in the customers, but even curating the packages of what the products are.

We're not shipping you one cheese steak out to San Francisco. Everything is kind of bundles, more group kind of packages. And so it's not. apples to apples generally with the things that you might see on a local delivery site. And we actually let our partners set the price. We figure out the logistics cost. And of course, we have a margin on every order. But there's no like fixed rate card.

And we work on a case by case basis depending on each product, it's time in transit. What's the most popular? What are the three most popular items this year? You know, enduring pandemic. What broke out? So it's every month, there's different things that are. hot, right? Like in the summertime, it might be something different that's totally different during gift season. Comfort foods, right? As a mission, our company is, our mission as a

company is to bring people comfort through food, whatever they dream of, wherever they are. And I think food is very personal. So, like, Jason's comfort food might be totally different than Joe's comfort food. And so for some people, it's pizza. For some people, it's barbecue. For some people, it's a decadent cake or ice cream sandwiches. And so it really is on a case-by-case basis. But I'll say one of the really exciting categories that's grown the fastest for us is high-end chef meal kits. Yes. So we're talking about chefs that you would have thought would have never thought about shipping in the past. We work with them at a really high level to create these packages and create these like unbelievable chef meal kit. Well, you got

Danny Meyer was an early investor and David Chang and Momofuku are both embracing it. So for them, those guys are trailblazers. Yeah. They're looking to do innovative things. Totally. Totally. And listen, when we say do innovative things, in 2013, like, that wasn't a conversation that would happen.

But I think, you know, in the last few years, Danny, of course, has been so instrumental in a lot of things in that regard. We ship places like Gramercy Tavern, which I know. Yeah. You love. I mean, have you had their burger kit that we ship? It's like truly. I didn't know you had a burger kit from there.

I mean, Gramercy Tavern. My office used to be in Union Square behind the theater on the east side of Union Square. What's that theater over there? AMC? The AMC on 19th? No, no, no. Like the actual performance space on 15th and Union Square Park on the east. I forgot the name of it.

Anyway, we were behind that theater in a little office space. So I would go up to Gramercyeater and I sit there for five hours in the cafe up front. It was just amazing place to work. But I had Nick Kocanis on the podcast from Alina and talk, and he put me on to, because I was talking about like who makes the best hot dogs because I wanted to have hot dogs. And I'm not like really a hot dog guy, but he was like Vienna beef hot dogs, Chicago. And sure enough, you had it. They got a great package.

You can get it for, I think, yeah, I'm looking at it right now. Serve 16, 80 bucks. You get a bunch of hot dogs. You get the relish. You get the celery sauce. and you get the poppy, I'm sorry, sesame seed bagels. You got it as an editor pick. J. Cal is going to give it an editor's pick right now as well.

If you're into hot dogs, like these beef franks with the Chicago-style relish, which looks like it's like nuclear. I mean, it's a color green I've never seen. I don't know what they put in it, but it is delicious and awesome. Hey, hot dog and other classical American regional food, Chicago does their thing with hot dogs. But you know, you have a classic New York dog. You know about a New Jersey dog, which is basically like a sausage and peppers meets a hot dog in a pizza crust gigantic bun from this place called Jimmy Buffs. Oh, they use pizza dough.

It's a pizza dough giant bun, hot dogs, onions, peppers, and actually fried potatoes. And it's mind-blown. I've had sausage and peppers just on an Italian roll, but that sounds unbelievable. So you just raised $100 million. The business is obviously scaling up. Are you going to spec this thing or how are you thinking about it on a corporate basis? And where do you sit? Are the Uber Eats of the world and the Amazon's watching what you're doing saying,

hey, this is a business that could reach a billion dollars. We need to be in it? Yeah, everybody's watching. I think we were probably the most transformative company in food. transformative company in food tech over the last year, year and a half. We've created partnerships with restaurants who, in the words of a lot of chefs at restaurants, chefs don't like a lot of these other startups that they work with, and they love us. And so people notice that.

And people get jealous of that. People obviously are kind of like eyeballing what we're doing. As far as like what our long-term plan is, I mean, we're focused on building the business, bringing people comfort and happiness through food experiences, empowering restaurants around the country to enter an economy that they have never been a part of. Like right now we work with 900 restaurants across the country. And that's about double, yeah, about double what we were like, you know, 18 months ago. there are thousands and thousands of restaurants that are doing just interesting, amazing things

across the country. And we want to celebrate that craftsmanship, tell that story. And most importantly, bring people happiness if that's what they crave and that's what they dream of. Pretty amazing looking at Joe's pizza all sold out. They just sell out every day or they got like a limit on how many they'll ship. Yeah, it's case by case. You know, we have some folks that can really, you know, do a lot of volume. And a lot are mom and pop shops that kind of, you know, hit certain thresholds or sell out quickly.

You make me think of Franklin Barbecue in Austin. Oh, yeah. Sure. But Franklin, my time. Unbelievable brisket. And they sell out. They release brisket every Monday. And, you know, I think it's around midnight.

And they sell out like pretty much instantly. I think they're actually sold out for, I placed an order myself this week. I think they're sold out until basically like end of October or November. Yeah. Well, you know a guy. You can just jump. It's up the line. I know, but you know, you don't want to do that all the class.

Of course you do. Of course you do. You certainly want to do it for your friends with podcasts. It's very, I mean, 250 for a brisket. I think it's probably a pretty good deal because you can make your own for 150, but to get a Franklin's one for 250, pretty great. And you have Terry Blacks. By the way, somebody took me to Terry Blacks in Austin when I was there.

And I think there's like a Blacks in a barbecue in Austin. And then there's Terry Blacks. Terry Blacks is the one you want to go to. But not for Brisket. The brisket is okay. The barbecue is the brisket shop and then Franklin. Those are the two best in that order, in my opinion. But Terry Blacks has the beef ribs, which is exactly what you're featuring on the site.

See, this is where I look at and I know you got credibility. The obvious thing for you to do, I would think, is these food courts are becoming like a thing, right? Like, I eatily and that kind of stuff. Like I was in Florence, they had an eatily there. And they just opened a food court somewhere down here in San Jose or something. they've gotten really popular. Have you thought about doing like your own gold belly, like destination store and then taking a half dozen or two dozen of the folks here and letting them set up shop? It's a no-brainer.

It's a lay-up. You know, we think about a lot of crazy things. I'm asking you thought about this one. This had to come up. Yeah, of course we think about that. And we've been approached by a lot of sports teams, a lot of developers. about doing lots of interesting things. And I think, you know, when the time comes, we obviously will evaluate the opportunities.

There is just so much for us to do online in scaling that that is really kind of like the area of our focus. But there are some very cool kind of transformative fun things that we could do on the ground. And yeah, it's just a matter of time, I think, before some of those happen. See, what I like about that idea for you is, there's more people who don't know what Goldbelly is than do. and you know same reason amazon i think bought whole foods was right you know their loyalty program is prime right and so you go there you eat the food and then it's like hey by the way if you like this brisket you want to send you want to join the brisket club you upsell them on the monthly subscriptions because now you have the monthly boxes just a no-brainer and i just realized another

thing that's happened for you is all of these people who now can work remote and have left cities or moved 45 minutes, an hour and a half. Everybody in New York, my understanding is going up and living up in Kingston and Wyndham and everybody moved upstate New York, which was always supposed to turn over when I was a kid and become like the next Hamptons. It never did. Now I understand all these hipsters have taken over those small towns up north. They got to be shipping the stuff like crazy because they must be losing their minds without any of their favorite foods, yeah? Pandemic was a boom for you? So, yeah, it was. And, you know, so that crowd, we call foodies in the boonies.

Foodies in the boonies. That's great. And that's like one of our big demographics, right? Like when you talk about these like local delivery companies, like everybody's really saturating the five biggest cities and trying to get you your burrito in 15 minutes instead of 25. But this, you know, 90% of the country lives outside of the three biggest cities. And a lot of those folks are well traveled, love food, right?

It's a new generation where food is kind of a little more central to their, DNA and their personal life story. So people appreciate these foods and the craftsmanship and the experiences. And so, yes, absolutely. Like foodies and the balloonies and people who've moved out, people who live in places that are not called New York, L.A. or Chicago are a big demographic for us. You know, I think the boom of the pandemic, yeah, like whenever there's a crisis, people try new things, right?

People step out of their comfort zone. And I think for us, you know, the convergence of e-commerce, the love of restaurants, which kind of went to a new level for a lot of people really realizing how much they love restaurants and the places they would go to. And the number one thing people love about travel is food. And we're at the convergence of those three things. So it's one of those things where it's like, you know, we've been at it for eight or nine years. but I think in some ways maybe we were a little bit early. And I think the crisis and the pandemic kind of opened people's eyes. They had heard about us.

They gave us a shot and they fell in love with the platform and realizing they could get a magical food experience in a box shipped to their door and basically transform their kitchen or their dining room or their family get together into their favorite restaurant anywhere in the country. And I think, you know, it's the beginning of really this at home. food experience, at home restaurant experience category that we've given birth to, that is just in its early stages right now. What food did you fail at?

Which food did not travel? You just had to give up. We can figure everything out. And we have a packaging science team now internally. Originally, that was me and Frank Luciano, who's our chief business officer. But now it's a full team. Oh, Frankie Al's on your team. I don't know that.

Frankie Al? You know? Really? Frankie Looch. I know it's called. But, okay, wait. So what is the science of- What is that?

I mean, is it dry ice? Is it, you know, the keeping it stable so it doesn't get too messy? Or is it separating it into its component parts and letting you repackage it? It's a combination of a bunch of things. I think, you know, the first thing. to think about is different foods have to be shipped in different ways. The easiest way to think about it is would it travel well in a freezer, a fridge, or a pantry? And obviously, the pantry things are the easiest, cookies, brownies, things like that. Fridge might be like fine steaks, for example.

It might be hot chicken. It might be deli items or bagels. And then frozen, it might be those deep-dish pizzas. It certainly would be ice cream. So it's everything is a case-by-case basis. It's how it's packaged, how it's moved, how fast it has to get there, which, by the way, affects what the price is, the faster it has to get there, the higher the price. So ice cream is going to be a big premium and bagels because you can't have them, but a frozen pizza, if it comes in five days or three days or seven days, it doesn't actually matter, right? And the dry ice or whatever you pack it with that last couple of days? Generally, that's right. And, and, And the other thing, just like to keep in mind, when you're a chef, every piece of food that

you get is not moving out the door the same day. So chefs and restaurants actually know how to keep food, know how to reheat food, know how to prepare food. And so it's, you know, Dave Chang actually said this. It's like the ego for the chef had to get thrown out the window during the pandemic, where historically some chefs might just be like, oh, I would never do this. It's not going to be exactly the same to, oh, actually, if you could have this magical experience in your home and you don't live in my neighborhood or town, I want you to have

that if you love my food. I'll think of how we can bring that back or I'll show you my recipe. I'll send you my ingredients. And so all of a sudden, in a weird kind of way, the pandemic brought people closer to chefs and restaurants closer than ever, where they were sharing the secrets. And I'm not sure if you saw, but we launched this new initiative called Goldbelly Live about a year and a half ago. Oh, I saw that you're doing classes for a hundred bucks. Well, so it's a live interactive class where you get the Gold Belly package.

And for free, you're in this live class with the chef. And they're showing you how to- misunderstood it. Yeah, so you actually get the food. So it's the first truly interactive cooking show where you're getting the food that the chef prepares and they're showing you how to make their signature dishes at home. So it's been a really incredible experience. I look at that all this dumpling classes.

Wow. And a bow kid. Oh, wow, that's dope. That's actually a ridiculous value. Think about that. If you could get somebody from Florence, you know, to teach me how to make like steak Florentine, you could actually ship me the steak in the U.S. But put me on with a chef in Florence.

Have you had any international, you know, aspirations or any international tests? I know that sounds crazy. but that does seem like the next shoe to drop. Like there are things I love in Tokyo. There are things I love in Paris and Spain and Italy that I would just die to be able to replicate here. Yeah. Well, you know, I told you before what our mission is, right? So it's to bring Jason comfort and happiness and make his food dreams come true.

So our mission would not be complete until we achieve that. Have you heard of Francis Melman, the Argentinian chef? He's famous for the giant like assados and the hanging meats and vegetables. Oh, wait. He's the guy in Miami at that new hotel, the, the faena. I had dinner at the faena with the owner of the faena. And that chef did that for us on a giant thing. We had like 15 people, a couple of my friends.

And it was outrageous. Outrageous. I mean, it's like the best meat, best grilled meat that you could like ever have. So we actually ship Francis Melman. Wow. And we've partnered up with him. And it's this unbelievable like grill kit that you ask like what some of my favorites are. It's something that I've ordered like two or three times this summer.

It's this like full assato kit where you get the most amazing meats and side dishes. And you can basically have this event for friends or family that come over using your own grill based on his recipes. Wow. Is the meat already cooked or is it prepared and seasoned? What state is the meat in when I get it? You reheating or are you cooking? So it's totally raw. So this is raw steaks and it's, you know, there's a skirt steak.

There's a, there's a rib steak. There's four different steaks. There's his signature potato sides. Nice. All of the chimmy chutti sauces and the hot sauces. And it's just like, it's insane. You know what? I got to give you credit.

When I was in Miami on that same trip, I was with a couple friends of mine and we're like, let's go, you know, to Little Havana. Let's have a little adventure. and I was going to take them to one place that I like for croquettes and Cuban sandwiches. But then, you know, I hit my Twitter and I was like, hey, what's good in the, you know, Cuban sandwich space? Somebody says, sandwich is the one I got to go to. You got sanguiche.

Have you ever been there? Sanguished in Miami? I haven't been there. I've ordered it multiple times. It's actually like a Goldbelly team favorite. Everybody is obsessed with their prequished. with their product. They make a beef one though.

See, you got the Cuban kit and the croquette sandwich, but they also make a beef one they haven't put here yet. So see, you're, we got to get on that. Displace sandwich is unbelievable. You should have gone to Goldbelly to figure out what the places to go. You could reverse engineer it. That's true, yeah.

Locally. I use Twitter. People, a lot of people use that. I use Twitter to figure all that out. Yeah. Did you go to Versailles for a Cuban sandwich or a Catholicaleche? You know, I like the capital there. I, when I stay at the addition hotel there, I like the addition.

And then here's the thing. The addition, this is one of the craziest moments. I'm at the addition. And I go downstairs. They got the food court there. You know, they got like a nice food court with like a lot of different stations. I order a cappuccino. Yeah.

She gives me the bill. I kid you not, it's $13. And I look at it. I said, oh, it's the wrong bill. I said, that's the wrong bill. And I hand it back to her. I said, I just had one cappuccino. She goes, yeah, I know.

And I look at it. And it's like $9.50 for a cappuccino plus like, you know, tax or whatever. And I look at her and I say, can I talk to the manager for a second? And I never do this. And I'm a hundred percent tipper, like in these instances, like, almost because. And the manager comes over. I said, listen, I just want to tell you something. I love staying here.

this is the most abusive thing I've ever seen in my life just because you can charge 950 for a Copacino she goes Mr. Calacanis I get this like twice a day that people are shocked

I was like okay because I just wanted to tell you because I love staying here but she's like I'm gonna comp it for you I'm like I'm totally comping for you I really appreciate the feedback I said I just got to tell you like I love staying here but this is the kind of thing when you do something abusive like this

that it kills the experience because you feel like you're getting price gouge. I'm like, I expect this if I'm at like Yankee Stadium or something or at the movie theater, but not at the hotel. She's 100% right. I was like, you know, I'm in the industry or whatever. You know, I grew up in the restaurant business. I go up, I swear to God, she buys me a bottle of rosé, a $60 bottle of rosé puts in my room with a fruit plates.

So now she's in for a hundred. I gave the woman $20 when they canceled my bill and gave her a $20 tip. But I go next store and there is a Cuban restaurant right next door to the addition. And they make me a cafe Cubano or cafe con lece. I kid you not. It's a dollar or a dollar 50. And I hit three of those things. I'm on the fucking moon, Joe.

Those things are the greatest. They put a, they put a toothpick in it or like a wood star. There's so much sugar in that cafe con lece and that and that, that cafe Cubano, it stands up. That's how good. I love that. I think I know the place. Are you, is it like a little dinery looking place? It is like a little like a storefront diner with Fomaca,

Formica tables, and you can get like Ropa Vija, whatever you want there. Like it's, the food's good. You know, it's like, but the coffee's great. And, you know, the only thing I don't like is they give it to you in a little tiny styrofoam cup. I don't know what it is about the Cubans and these styrofoam cups, but they love the styrofoam and I'm just like, please give it to me in a glass or whatever. Like, even if you're staying there, they give it to you. I don't know.

I'm a little bit beside me. What's your favorite food city? You got a favorite. You and I'm going to hang. When I come to New York, you're going to hang. We're going to go to a next game and hang. We got to do some food touring. Although we'll probably end up at Gramercy Tavern and a next game.

Well, no, we'll go to a Knicks game. And then my friend Mark Schroesman just opened Marks off Madsen. And he is a dope chef. He did Campania and then he did Freds at Barney's on if you know that. And he's just a great chef. Anyway, favorite city. Yeah, let's check it out. Favorite food city outside of New York.

Hey, so, I mean, obviously I have a bunch. but there's really two that come to mind. They're down south. So number one is New Orleans. Beniers. Café Dumont. It's its own planet. It's its own planet of American food.

So Creole food, Cajian food. So everything from gumbo to po-boy, the bollettas, which is like the best, yeah. I mean, you know, a shrimp po-boid. Fried oyster. A muffoletta, which is like the best fried oysters. that I say gumbo, just the Cajun spices, the Creal spices. And what's crazy about New Orleans, even outside of their own American cuisine, there's

a great Israeli place called Shia. Yeah, there's great just like American food in addition to like the Cajun and Creole and classics. For people who don't know, Palloy is just a hoagie. It's a sandwich. which is a subway, but it usually has fried fish or something. Fried oysters, fried shrimp, fried croft. I mean, it's just unbelievable.

Yeah, on this light, on this light hero bread, you could do it with like beef as well, like shredded beef is also super popular. And then like Commander's Palace, places like Commander's Palace. So it's just, yeah. And then Nashville, of course, hot chicken, buttermilk biscuits, dry, rub, bar. barbecue. And when I went to school there, it wasn't like this hot spot. People used to actually say, like, Joe, what the hell are you going down to Nashville for college? And now it's like this destination for bachelor parties and weddings and stuff like that. So yeah, I put those two

at the top. I've been getting into this Shaq Shuka. You know this, the, you know, they put it in the cast iron and they put the eggs and the, I don't know what, is, is. Is, you know, is, Is it, it's Turkish, I guess, huh? You know, Middle Eastern. Yeah, it's Middle East Arabic, I guess, yeah. Yeah, I know that, you know, my father was Israeli, and, like, he grew up and, like, he like, prepared it. And literally my wife's favorite food that he ever made was his Shakshuka.

That's what I'm having for breakfast tomorrow. Yeah, it's spicy, basically spicy eggs. Eggs poached with eggs just kind of floating around the tomato sauce. It's like a lot of liquidy. is great. Yeah. I mean, I just went to Italy and I'm getting obsessed with gelato. I'm thinking about starting a gelato stocker or none.

But these plate, have you been to Italy ever? Yeah, the gelato, the pasta, the pizza, obviously. The gelato is incredible. I've been like going down the rabbit hole about gelato. And it turns out, you know, it's got less fat content and more of the actual ingredients and less sugar. So when you eat it, it's like a third of the calories. I'm like, why am I eating gelato every day and losing weight while I'm in Italy? It was like, well, I'm walking a mile to the gelato place or biking.

And then you have this pistachio ice cream. And I'm like, looking at a line, they put so much ground pistachios in it or whatever they're using as ingredients that. And they don't put a lot of sugar and doesn't, you know, usually doesn't have egg yolks or all that cream. Listen, you're a great guest. You got to check out, by the way, Cafe Pana in New York, which is doing that. It's actually Danny Meyer's daughter. Yeah. who opened this shop.

Right by where your office used to be, actually, it's an Irving place. And it's, we have it on Goldbelly, obviously. I see it. Yeah, yeah, no. I mean, that Irving place was right around. I know that corner. That was the corner of where my office used to be.

Oh, my Lord. Look at that. Yeah, it's unbelievable. Wow, she's crushing it, huh? She's still a well. Serious-looking ice cream. It's a great, great product. Like, seriously great product.

And this is kind of a controversy in Italy, you know, as the toppings on top. with the gelato. There are people who are like, don't put anything on top. You just eat the gelato. It speaks for itself. And then there are other places now that are going buck wild, putting stuff on the top, you know, crispy, crunchy, jelly things to make it a little bit more and I had this conversation three times of like, is that what you should be doing or not? And, you know, I'm just going to have. And what's your view? I think it's going to require more research. I'm going to be honest, Joe. I feel like I haven't

consumed enough. Americans want stuff. Americans want stuff on top and texture. and over the top. I think they do, and it's a little gratuitous, and I am now of the thinking, like, just enjoy, like, I just, they had black cherry gelato in Italy. That's kind of a thing, and they, like, saute the cherries, and then they have some cherries in this, you know, milky ice cream, a milky gelato, and then they'll put some cherries on top. And I had that maybe three or four nights in a row when I was in Florence at the best place there,

and it was extraordinary and it just blew my mind. But you know, coffee ice cream also very good. I wouldn't touch that. I wouldn't put anything on top of that. It speaks for itself. You know, that sounds too good. Yeah, I speak for itself.

All right, listen, Joe, I'll see you when I'm in New York. Let's go next. Congratulations. Everybody go on Goldbelly. Order something. Should I order this like Goldbelly best of?

What do I get for $7.50 a year? I get 10 months or something or 12 months. Yeah, you get 12 months. Yeah, we basically we pick a box for you that's like one of like the best product on the site every month. People love it. So, hey, once a month, if you want to surprise you and bring you a little bit of happiness. 50 divided by 12, right? Works out to like 62 bucks a box. Is that like a loss leader for you? You make a profit on that or is that just to like a give back? Because that seems to me like too good of a deal. It is. It actually is. Yeah. I mean, it is what we would

call a loss leader for our best customers, where it's like, if you love Goldbelly, so much that you're doing that, we love you. And so that is a little secret that we've never told. I'm ordering it now. It's fucking. How's the gifting business doing? Is that doing good too? Gifting?

Corporate gifting, people giving gifts? Yeah. So gifting, like, end of year is a huge gifting time, obviously. And so we get this whole, like, influx of, like, people sending gifts. Yeah. This year, it's going to probably be even crazier than before because even, like, within companies who would cater corporate events, employees are spread out. So we have people sending hundreds of Goldbelly items around and then doing Zooms and all.

Sometimes we're even getting the chef to help out. So this is really cool interactive thing that we're going to play with in that category to innovate in that space. But it's, yeah, gifting is always a huge time of year for us, for sure. Yeah. I've seen a lot of pitches of this of people trying to do like, you know, remote culture building exercises, like, you know, oh, we're going to do a single mall scotch tasting, whatever.

Everybody gets on Zoom. It's a little dystopian, but if you send me a package from Goldbelly, it's not going to be dystopian at all. And you've got 20 employees and you send them all this, you know, banana bread pudding from Magnolia. You know, it costs 75 bucks a pop, but it's going to make employees feel fucking great. So I recommend everybody try it.

I'm going to try it with my team. See what. Maybe I'll pick something to send everybody to the team. All right, man. Listen. All right, man. Thanks. Great job. Love the love the service. Thanks for coming on the show. And we'll see you all next time on this week and start us. Bye-bye.