This Week in Startups - Privateer Space CEO Alex Fielding: cleaning up space junk with Steve Wozniak + Behind the scenes of working for Jason | E1465

Episode Date: May 21, 2022

First, Jason and Molly reflect on their time in previous tech recessions (03:06). Then, Privateer Space CEO Alex Fielding joins to discuss solving the space junk problem (18:02), the difficulties of mapping debris (33:25), and more. Then, Producer Rachel hosts an OK Boomer episode where she talks with the other Gen Z employees that work for Jason about how they got their jobs and what they've learned at Launch (1:00:21). (00:00) Jason and Molly tee up today’s episode (03:06) Ask JaMo: What do you remember about the tech industry during the dotcom era and recession? (12:45) Where was Molly in 2008 and how did her career change? (11:31) BetterHelp - Get 10% off your first month at https://betterhelp.com/twist (12:45) Where was Molly in 2008 and how did her career change? (18:02) Jason and Molly speak with Alex Fielding, CEO and Co-Founder of Privateer Space (21:04) OpenPhone - Get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at https://openphone.com/twist (22:20) More on the dangers of space junk (32:12) AdQuick - Visit https://adquick.com/twist and mention TWIST to get $1000 off your first campaign. (33:25) Is it humanly possible to clean space trash with so many variables? (1:00:21) Producer Rachel tees up this week’s special OK Boomer segment (1:10:31) OK Boomer: Rachel speaks with LAUNCH’s other Gen Z employees Check out Privateer: http://www.privateer.com/ FOLLOW Alex: https://twitter.com/2345678 FOLLOW Nick: https://twitter.com/nickcalacanis FOLLOW Presh: https://twitter.com/preshdkumar FOLLOW Justin: https://twitter.com/Justinpfortier FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

All right, everybody, it is Friday of All In Summit Week. We made it. We made it. Now you might... We were on a boat yesterday. We were on a boat yesterday. We were on a boat. No big. But we're here for you today in the feed. And that's what really matters. You recently may have seen the news that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has co-founded a new space company, space related company. And we got the CEO on to talk to us. That's right. Alex Fielding joins us. today to talk about cleaning up all the junk in space. Obviously, getting to space, thanks to Elon and SpaceX and a number of other players, but mainly Elon, they've got them really cheap. It turns out when you reuse the rockets, you can get a lot more stuff up there and bigger payloads. And now there's a lot of stuff out there.

There'll be more stuff out there. That means things can collide. And colliding at 18,000 miles per hour, it's not a fun experience, it turns out. And the Russians happen to be blowing stuff up in space because they can. So it's getting a little. little bit sloppy. It's a little scary out there. A little scary.

Yeah. It's time to do a little cleanup work. So Alex explains that. Yeah, he's a total pro. You're really going to love this interview. There's just a lot of like geeky space talk. The Nodi's loved it when we recorded it. It's just super fascinating about what that low Earth orbit ecosystem is starting to look like.

Yeah. There's going to be a lot of great stuff out there. Everybody's going to have internet around the planet. And they're going to have it at a really affordable cost thanks to Amazon's Constellation. SpaceX's Starlink Constellation. I think there's a third one coming out. And we also talk... They all blow each other up.

Well, we actually talk about weapons in space and the history of that. I thought that was an interesting diversion, if you remember, on the conversation that we got into. So this is going to be a great interview for you. But first, we're going to answer a quick ask Jason and Molly. We have to add Molly to it about downturns. It's going to be a great episode.

Yeah, stick with us. This week in Startups is brought to you by BetterHelp. Providing access to easy, affordable, and private professional counseling anytime, anywhere. Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com slash twist. Open phone. As a startup founder, a lot of mistakes are easy to roll back, but using your personal cell phone number as your company number isn't one of them. Openphone makes it easy to get business phone numbers for you and your team, right on top of your

existing devices. Visit openphone.com slash twist to get 20% off your first six months. And AdQuick. If most of your advertising dollars are going to digital ads, it's time to diversify. Out of home advertising, like billboards, offers low-cost, high-value reach. AdQuick makes it easy to plan, buy, and measure all in one place. Visit adquick.com slash twist and mention twist to get $1,000 off your first campaign. All right, everybody, it's time for an ask, Jason, sorry, S. J-Mo. We have to rebrand this because Molly's here to help out as well. And here is the question, what do you remember about the tech industry during the

dot-com crash and the Great Recession? Two different moments in time. Any specific things that stand out to you? What a great question. Yeah, so I was, in the dot-com era, I was 30 years old. I had my magazine. And in 2008, I was 38. I was born in 1970. It's really easy to do the math.

And so the first one was particularly brutal on me because I had a magazine Silicon Alley Reporter, about 100 employees. And I had to go down to six. And that was hard to lay off 80 people who you loved working with. And we were doing over, I think we did $11.6 million in revenue in 2000. And then we went down to 600,000 in revenue 2001.

It was perhaps one of the most brutal, brutal years of my life. And I got through it and kind of made me the entrepreneur I am today. Molly, where were you in 1999 to 2001? I was at CNET and it was, CET was not like the most high fly in. So it's not like we lost all our foothball tables or anything like that. But there's one memory that sort of sticks with me always. and that memory is of all of us, like, in our kind of pod working, realizing there had been some big market move, right?

There was like a big crash and everybody was like, huh, I wonder what's going on here? And then all of a sudden a hawk hit the window at C-Net. Like, slams in downtown San Francisco. It was down by fishermen's wharf. Not too many hawks. Yeah. Not a lot of hawks. No.

thrashed into the window, like almost like an earthquake. Like it was the most intense and then it was so upsetting. And then this hawk is like laying on the ground outside. And everybody went over to the window. And it was just this like really weird. I know that there should be a larger lesson here, but sometimes life is just a metaphor. And that happened. And all of us stood there.

And we were like, whoa. This feels like kind of a bad sign. And then like two days later, September 11th happened. Yeah. I mean, people forget that one, two punch. once. Yeah, we were already on the ropes and then 9-11 happened and you kind of got the sense that the world was a very dark place, that you were unsafe, and that the age of innocence, the innocence was over for our generation. We had just lived this life where the internet

happened when we were in our 20s. Everything was going up into the right and young people were coveted, believed in, they were looked to for the future and then kind of everybody thought dot com is a scam, much like people look at crypto as a scam today. And then 9-11 happened and you thought, well, this is the first time we are going into a war. When we had this obscure concept of war with drones in the Middle East during the Gulf War. But again, with a volunteer army, it didn't really impact everybody. And it wasn't on our shores. It was in the, you know, in people's minds.

Like there's a desert very far away from here. and we have some interest in the oil and some number of thousands of us are going there and lots of them are dying, but we're not, you know, the ones on the short end of stick. We have this crazy dominance. So it was very weird. Like the Gulf War was this CNN, you know, almost like a movie. You know, if it was in a mirage that you were watching, like, is this real or not? Like with the bombs going off in Baghdad. Whereas 9-11, you knew people who died.

You saw people jumping out of the buildings. you saw the buildings collapsed. It was incredibly traumatizing having lived through it. I literally had PTSD from it. I can't even imagine having been in New York. And then our version of it, which is kind of absurd to think about now. And I'm not trying to throw anybody under the bus. But because those two things were happening in conjunction, we laid people off that day.

Yes. Like we were on the West. We had a New York office. But it was like it was happening at the same time as the crash. Yep. nobody really totally understood the magnitude of, I think, how it was going to unfold, how bad it was. I don't know, but I know that those two things, like, literally we sort of were at home. Nobody went into work that day, but also we had layoffs.

And to me, it's that, to me, those two things are really inextricable. They can't be separated. And then the other big memory is having dinner with some friends, all of whom worked in the tech industry and having, you know, our one really plain spoken friend be like, you know, clearly things are going to get bad, a lot's happening here. And she goes, but we're going to be okay. She's like, let's not, let's not kid ourselves about who's not going to be okay in this economy and who is. And it was a pretty harsh, you know, it was a harsh lesson.

And we see it over and over. Yeah, I think who winds up getting screwed in these things and the definition of like, you know, what is truly screwed. Like, you know, people died in 9-11. Yes. horrific. And then, you know, our economy slowly recovered. And it was just a shocking, it was shocking for people. And I think as you get older and you live through these things, you start to realize these things pass. It is the human condition. There have been wars. There will continue to be wars in our lifetimes. There are boom and bus cycles in the economy. And, you know, you can prepare for them. Doesn't mean they won't be shocking when they do happen. But generally things will pass and things will be okay. And I think that leads up to 2008, which was, you know, the great recession for people who don't remember that. I was running, I guess, Mahalo at the time, which is now inside venture-backed.

And I just started, was just about to start angel investing. And the market collapsed. I didn't have a lot of equities. I had moved all of my money in the markets into revenue-backed muni bonds, 18 months before the market crashed. No. So I just had a sense that everything was overheated and didn't make sense to me

and I moved 100% of my money into revenue-backed muni bonds, which are ones that have like a bridge behind them. So the bridge tolls go to the bondholders first. So even in the rare case where a muni bond would go under, which is very rare, like a town has to go bankrupt because they get sued or something,

the municipal ones of the bonds are, my understanding was that those were the most valuable. And it turns out they weren't in fashion. So the core value of the bonds went up like 10 or 20% and I was making 4% or 5% tax-free. So I wound up playing the economy perfectly and then I went into investing mode. So I was a little older, 37 years old, 38 years old. And it was clear to me that the Warren Buffett quote, having lived through the dot-com era, was in effect. And I immediately said, time to invest.

What a great time to be investing in companies. What a great time to be buying stocks. And so as Warren Buffett said, be greedy when investors are fearful and be fearful when investors are greedy. Everybody was scared. I became greedy. And right, you know, the last couple of years, people have been greedy. And I've been really scared talking on this podcast. Bill Gurley's been very clear about this.

Fred Wilson, anybody who's been through these things, a couple of super cycles. And so, as I said on the all in that came out today and I've been saying on this podcast, you know, now's the time to be an angel investor. And a lot of the big wins I had, you know, came to fruition in the last five years. And now I'm back to investing in companies. I mean, never stopped. But, you know, I think this is the year, the next two years are going to be the best time to be investing in startups. The valuations will be reasonable.

Competition for employees will not be as intense. There's always competition for great team members, but it won't be like they'll have six or seven offers. And three of them will be from big tech companies that now have higher. freezes. So you're not competing with Uber and Facebook and Apple because they're probably either have freezes or are maybe even going to be laying people off. And Twitter has a freeze I guess on now and is laying some people up. Sometimes people don't even realize the stress they're under. They get physical symptoms like headaches. Maybe they're grinding their teeth. I used to do that. Even digestive issues, right? You get that pin in your stomach. Well, those are all indicators of

stress. And let's not forget about doom scrolling like I do, oh my God, and not getting enough sleep. When you're a founder or capital allocator, the weight of the world is on your shoulders and it's stressful. And listen, it's been a stressful couple of years with the pandemic and the swings in the stock market. So here's your reminder to take care of yourself and maybe try some therapy. Better help is customized online therapy that offers you video, phone and even live chat sessions with your therapist. There is no shame in the game of getting therapy. Go do therapy. Get some stuff off your chest. Have somebody listen to you and just have a place where you can spend an hour, a half hour, whatever it is, and just let it be about you

and solving your problems and releasing a little bit of that anxiety. It's much more affordable than in-person therapy and you can do it on your time and you can do it at your space, right? So give it a try. Twist listeners get 10% off their first month at BetterHelp.com slash twist. That's B-E-T-T-E-R-H-E-L-P dot com slash twist. But where were you in 2008? And how did your career change? I tend to think of it all as a little bit of a lost decade. Like, we were certainly investing in different types of content.

That was, I mean, because there was sort of less pressure, CBS came in and bought CNET, so we had a lot more flexibility then to sort of experiment with things like a digital video and we had already sort of done some of the pivot to video. So I actually, I sort of credit that time as being a weirdly useful creative time. Like we got to play with every single format because everybody was trying to figure out the next way to make money in media in particular. And so without that, I think I wouldn't necessarily have had the exposure into every single version of my, every single version of journalism at that time, right?

like I did TV and I was doing digital video and all of that. Well, as I was going to say, it's a really great point. When the market is down, people get very experimental. They try a lot of different things. And when the market is up, you know, maybe people are chasing something or whatever. It's very nice for artists and for founders and creatives generally in that down market because, you know, the expectations low. You can try it doing a little experiment and you try to this new thing called podcasting because

what do you got to lose, you know? The business is kind of grinding. Like we were sort of streaming TV was starting to be a bigger deal. We had a little show for TiVo. I mean, at that, that is the point where I wrote, seen at a business plan.

I was like, hey, let me do a half hour broadcast caliber, online video show. We got a deal with Xbox out of it. Like, I went all over the world shooting the show

because we were looking for the next big thing. It is like a useful time. But I will say like in terms of awareness. Did they do layoffs? By the way? I was so young. Did they do layoffs in that 2008 period? or just hiring freeze or some i think we did some layoffs in a hiring freeze i mean honestly it felt like

that whole period was a little bit of a sideways freeze you know it was just a little bit sideways yeah um and we did fine as a company but it was all like a little bit stuck but there's also the stuff you're not aware of until later it wasn't until later that i went back and took stock and was like oh like we bought a house in 2006 like a bunch of dumdums and you know like there's there's there are differing levels of awareness I think, depending on what stage you're in your life. So I'm like, I feel very to your point, ready for a downturn. Now I'm like, let's go.

I call my financial advisor. I'm like, big sale at the stock store. We shop in? Yeah, exactly. What's happening? If we did this nice little exercise recently on the pod where we just said, what's the market cap of the company minus out the cash? What's the enterprise value?

Now, as long as that company is not going to have the risk of ruin going to zero and they have customers in product, you know, there should be some value that would be created after that point. So, you know, whether it's Coinbase,

which had a little bit of a pop after, you know, we had this like panic selling last week, or, you know, Robin Hood had a little bit of a pop. I am a shareholder. Uber had a little bit of a pop. You'll start to see this bouncing along the bottom.

You know, I don't like to give financial advice, but my advice to you, Molly, just not to anybody else, is if you were, did love a product, you know, like you did love Peloton, or you did love Robin Hood, or you did love Uber or DoorDash, you could dollar cost average into those companies, which basically is a fancy way of saying, buying a little bit of time, taking nibbles, and then, you know, if the price goes

down, you buy a little more. So if you said, listen, I love this company. I'm going to buy it at $10 a share. Oh, it went down to $7. I bought some at 7. Oh, went down to 5. I bought some at 5. oh, it went back up to seven, I bought some at seven, oh, it went up to 10, I bought a little more at 10. So if you were going to buy $6,000 worth and you bought it $1,000 on the first of the month each month, well, then your average price might be $7,000. If you were going to buy it anyway, you know, most people would say if you're going to hold it for 10 years, it doesn't matter if you bought it all at 10 or 5 and everything in between because you're buying it with the hopes that it's going to go 5x. So if you want to optimize some people like that dollar cost averaging approach, I like that. Other people like to just make the bet and set it and forget it. I'm a set it and forget it, guys.

Love the company, bought the shares at a penny or 50 cents. It goes up to 60. It goes down to seven, which is what happened to my Robinon shares. I'm in it. I think it'll go back up to 60 in 10 years and I'll just sit here and I'll wait. And, you know, Uber will go to, I'm convinced Uber will be a trillion dollar company. People might think I'm crazy because it's been a $50 billion to, you know, $80 billion company as a public company.

but I see a 10 to 20x there and that's why I'm holding you have to make your own decision as to why you're holding and I look at the product and every time I use it I'm delighted and if it wasn't there I would be freaked out if I couldn't use it. So great question.

It's a good metric. And a great question exactly. Great question. All right on a we're just taking a complete turn in topic from downturn to we're going to the moon. Actually we're going to low Earth orbit with Alex Fielding. We're going to find all the junk flying around. Exactly.

CEO of privateer, Alex Fielding coming up next. Enjoy. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this week in startups interview edition. We know you've been getting interviews all week long while we are off on our adventures in Miami. Today, we're very, I definitely, and hopefully Jason, are very excited about this. We have Alex Fielding, the CEO and executive chairman at Privateer Space.

a company built in specifically to create technology to clean up the space debris problem. Alex co-founded privateer with Steve Wozniak, who's the president and Dr. Morabajah, who's chief scientist. And Alex, I cannot wait to hear more about what you're building there. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. Alex, are you a sanitation engineer by trade? Or an engineer by.

I like this. Is there we had a new job, a sanitation engineer to the stars, literally. That's where this all started. 20 years ago, Waz and I were building a company called Wheels of Zuse. We were building Apple tags like 20 years too early. I remember. And that was a bizarre time because, you know, there was no system on a chip for GPS 20 years ago. You had to do it all yourself.

You had to calculate ephemers. You had to do the hardware. You had to do the power management. You had to do software. Waz and I were pretty appalled 20 years ago. That shows how old I am. that half of the stuff we had on orbit was trash. So off our roughly 2,000 then satellites,

about 1,100 or 1,100 were dead. And we used to joke about this. Like, would we be the world's first space sanitation engineers riding on the back of the trash truck in space and tossing them in the compactor? But, you know, this is the definition of the tragedy of the commons. Nobody did anything. And 20 years later, we're tracking roughly 33,000 things

that are bigger than the size of a softball, they're bigger than 10 centimeters. And 75% of that's trash, which is unbelievable. Yeah. When you say trash, this is debris from satellites

and other space excursions we've had, correct? That's right. So what you're looking at here at privateer.com is an app we call Wayfinder. And all of the orange dots are active satellites, all the teal dots are dead satellites, and everything that's pink or purple. or gray. And if you close that window out, you can you can zoom out. And what you'll see when

you zoom out, keep zooming, keep going back. And this is the giant ball of trash we've made in space. So most of what you can see here is some form of debris, rocket bodies, you know, fuel, paint chips, nuts, bolts, screws. And what you're looking at here is stuff that's bigger than those paint chips, nuts, bolts, and screws, you're looking largely at pieces of trash that are, you know, like I said, bigger than a softball. It's kind of terrifying. I mean, imagine somebody throwing you a softball, but it's doing 18,000 miles an hour. That's a little, little tough to deal with. Listen, lots of founders are Lucy Goosey with their personal phone numbers. You know about this problem. People start putting their personal mobile phone in documents, proposals,

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They want to text. Well, open phone can help you with that as well, and it's affordable already. It's just $10 a month. I mean, it's so affordable. It's ridiculous. I think they should triple their prices. I think I would pay $30 a month for this, but they charge $10.

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If you're thinking about phone numbers, I just want you to think openphone.com slash that easy folks. Remind us for those who are not familiar with the kind of dangers of space trash, why, all the ways that this can kill us? Well, you know, mv squared is still mv squared, right? So the problem is if you think about getting hit by a bullet and that bullet's doing, you know, a kilometer a second, just imagine that bullet doing 17 times or 18 times that's beat. And that's what you're looking at, you know, here.

So it's really a huge challenge and it's even worse because it's kind of like that movie, you know, alien, right? It's like jaws in space. You don't ever see the monster until it's on you. And unfortunately, you know, it's the things that you can't see that can really mess things up in space. We have things crash into each other in space all the time. We have so many problems in low Earth orbit, especially that the gap between science fact and science fiction is just massive. I mean, we, we, We can't reliably dock in space. We can't reliably see the debris in space smaller than 10 centimeters. We can't reliably navigate between objects and space, partly because of both of these reasons.

And this enables the next frontier in space. If we all agreed that we invested in launch to get SpaceX to get this number down to like $5,000 a kilo, I can put that Coke can in space for less than $5,000, then all the infrastructure, It's like we built the highways to the stars. But now we have to build the restrooms, the Mickey D's, and everything else that goes to service it. So that means tug-toe operators, people doing stationkeeping, people trying to refuel satellites, people try to grab the dead ones and delta V them out.

All of that stuff needs this enabling underlying technology to be able to do it. And it's missing. So nobody's ever been killed by space trash falling from space, is my understanding, with some light web research. And the ISIS has had, the International Space Station has had to move a dozen times or so. Their protocol is when there are one in 10,000 chance of running into debris, they'll just reposition. So I guess, is this a problem today or are we really anticipating now that low Earth orbit satellites are being put in in a massive constellation by at least three companies, Amazon, SpaceX, Starlink, and then there's a third.

third one. I can't remember the name of it. One of my producers will help me. Is this a forward-looking problem, you think, because we haven't, I think, ever had any kind of fatal instance in space or on the ground because of space trash? It's rough, right? There's a couple of observations that are really painful just from a humanistic standpoint. Like, if you look at our launch sites and those inclinations that are convenient from those launch locations. And you look at where things are on orbit mostly from those sites. And keep in mind, many of these sites like Kennedy, they were planned in the 60s or, you know, and they've been operational for some time.

And the way that reentry for objects in space, natural orbital decay with reentry that doesn't happen over water was planned and it was planned was that this stuff would ultimately burn up and the bigger chunks of it would land in places that the United States didn't care about at the time. So we're talking sub-Saharan Africa, you know, the Congo, your far more likely on those reentry statistics to land in a place that is not Manhattan. Okay, Manhattan was set to be the lowest risk place to be hit by space trash. Yeah. So the stuff does reenter and it does reenter fairly frequently. And we've just been lucky that most of the time it lands in a sandy place, or in the ocean and doesn't land in your backyard or on a school.

But I do agree with you. Not having an on-orbit casualty, which is a great thing, is something that traditionally we didn't worry about a ton. We worried about it a little bit. Now we worry about it a ton. Because like you said, we move the space station fairly frequently. I mean, we move it four or five times a year minimum over the last couple of years to avoid debris.

And that debris is generally something that we can sense to take. from ground-based phase array and from some sensors in space and then we can kind of move the station as needed. And we have some tricks to how we do that. But look at what happened in November. The Russians blew up

Cosmos 1408 and then ASAT attack. And all the debris that resulted, that was an explosive payload from a missile hitting their own dead satellite and shooting debris the way an explosive charged us. It just went everywhere. Why did they do this? This was

a test to see if they could blow up other people's satellites in an aggressive fashion? Well, it was overflying their own airspace. They didn't really make any qualms about doing it. So they certainly didn't ask anyone for permission. And they did it. At the time, we all thought it was, I say we all. The bulk of the space community thought this was clear posturing and banging on the chest that if you overfly Ukraine, we will blow you up because they could.

They proved the capability yet again. If you overfly a satellite, so if you want to take pictures of Ukraine, we're going to blow up your satellite. Sure. Yeah. And I think, you know, for wronger, for wronger, because there was no right reason to do that, the problem was the propaganda machine in Russia did a fantastic job saying everything is good. Situation is green. It's all usual up here in space. What was the truth?

We had seven astronauts and cosmonauts on board that we told. to go to sleep in their escape vehicles and Soyuz and Crew Dragon, lock the door and wait. Why did we do that rather than move the space station or just tell them come home? It's dangerous. It's an unknown situation.

We can't see the small debris. It's just as dangerous to them. The space station's covered in a skin that we call the Whipple Shield. It's like Kevlar and aluminum with a gap and then there's some Kevlar and aluminum. And the idea is to kind of have the whatever hits it, break

up to smaller particles so that that bigger mass doesn't hit the hole and kill everybody. We didn't know where to move them because everything around the space station, like you said, Jason, one in 10,000 is the criteria, right? If you're going to get hit, if the likelihood's 1 in 10,000, you move. But what if everything around you is 1 in 10,000? Then what do you do? Yeah. And our resolution sucks. So if you have not very good resolution, and I can't tell you, this is the safer place to go, what do you tell them to do? And it's heartbreaking because that debris is going by them just like George Clooney and gravity every hour and a half. But they don't just get to jump in these skate vehicles, right?

They got to put their suits on. They got to go slide in. They got to close the doors. So this is like, this is going to be PTSD for this generation of astronauts for a long time. And here we're seeing the Whipple Shield. That's what it looks like. You got it. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's kind of like a crumple zone. It just slows down the impact of these things, yeah. Right. One hopes. And it gets hit all the time. Right. In fact, in May, right, it was May 2021 astronauts on the ISS discovered a hole, a 5-millimeter

wide hole in a robotic arm that was attached to one of the modules that they think was likely due to, so there's this, because you guys are thinking on space scale and planetary scale, there's sort of the, there's the danger now, which is acute, and we're to the point where we can't necessarily move the space station because the risk is almost equal everywhere. And then there's this sort of farther out danger, the Kessler effect, the idea that as these items collide with each other, they break up and create even more debris to the point where we might just trap ourselves on this planet because there will be such a cloud of debris around us that we can't get off.

Like, how much do you actually think about that? It's theoretical, I know. It's theoretical. I mean, the thing is that we. A part of the things that we don't know in space, right? And I could write a, that would be actually a really boring book. The things we don't know in space, they're all terrifying. But there's a whole lot of them that are very close to near Earth space.

So we don't know orbital carrying capacity, which is kind of the way in space terminology of talking about how congested is the highway. And there are certain orbits now that are already so congested, your launch window will be very, very small. There's certain sun synchronous orbits, polar orbits, where the FAA will only let you go maybe two hours a day. Why? The rest of the time, we have to space objects at a certain rate. Everybody wants to be there. It's a popular neighborhood. And we don't have the resolution to know how to properly space or how to more closely space the objects. So we've got this significant gap between objects because our space tracking is so bad. We then don't know

things like real astrodynamics. We treat all these objects in space like bowling balls, like there's spheres. So, and that's clearly not true. Like these satellites no longer look like Sputnik, right? So when you have a refrigerator with wings or a Coke can with wings, you know, its material properties, its drag profile and its mass, if they're unknown, how in the world would you calculate where that thing's going to be on the next orbit?

Especially if you treat it like a bowling ball. There's hundreds of these bizarre problems that need to be solved. And the technology's been missing because Leo was not the focus of the old world the space. Leo's kind of lower than lower than things. In 2022, digital ads are not what they used to be.

Costs are increasing, attribution is less effective, and targeting is failing. It's a bit of a mess out there, isn't it? So marketers need to diversify their media mix. We all know that. And they can do that with O-O-H. What is O-O-H you're asking?

That's out-of-home advertising. You remember murals, bench ads, maybe those posters that they put up on the side of like construction sites, all of that stuff falls into the bucket of O-O-H. These kind of ads offer great reach, higher brand recall, and the lowest CPMs of any traditional ad type. But buying O-O-O-H is a terrible experience. You don't want to get on the phones with thousands of different vendors. Well, AdQuick is here to change that. It's a super easy way to plan, buy, and measure every kind of outdoor advertising

from static billboards to painted murals. So I want you to go to adquick.com such twist and mention twist to get $1,000 off your first campaign? And listen to this. If you plan to send more than 10,000 a month, email VIP at Edwick.com for a VIP consultation. They added that for our audience to make it super special. VIP at adquick.com and tell them your uncle Jason sent you. Terms and conditions apply because they're giving you that $1,000 off. So I guess now the question is in your solution, how do we get these things out of the air? Because my understanding is well, they're moving at incredible velocity. You're saying they may not move perfectly,

i.e. it could just be a chunk off of this thing, so who knows what trajectory it's on. And so you've got to find it, you've got to somehow match its speed, get close to it, and then do something with it. How on earth are you going to clean up tens of thousands of little pieces out there? Is this seem as impossible to do as it seems to my brain?

Or is it actually something that's within our ability today? It's, there's a scale. So there are fantastic companies out there like Astroscale and ClearSpace are two great examples of companies that are working on docking with dead satellites and Delta Ving them into the atmosphere. So they burn up or moving things. There's companies that are now tugged. What was the term you used delta v? Delta V. So delta velocity, push it, push it into the atmosphere.

got it. This is, this approach, you know, tends to work pretty well. I mean, we haven't tested afterscale and clear space have not, you know, tested on large, you know, real satellites yet, but they're very close. They've flown quite a bit. They're getting better at things like active rendezvous, which is really just docking. But, you know, to do that, you have to know a whole host of things that are missing in space. So privateer is working on building the platform that connects all of these capabilities, the sensing and detecting, the tracking to observation capability to developers everywhere so that they don't have to fly stuff in space. Because the other part of the challenge is everybody that wants to fly something, now that

it's really cheap to fly, you know, SpaceX has got it to $5,000 a kilo. If you want to put something in space, if you want to put that Coke can in space, you could do it for $5,000 bucks a kilo. Well, as a result, everyone is putting something up and no one shares anything that's on orbit, at least not very well. So, privateer is working on breaking open that layer of things that are already in space with our own space assets to encourage developers to utilize those and share those through consumption-based APIs, similar to what Amazon's done on the ground with infrastructure

as a service with their data centers in AWS. Does that mean you want to just log where it is incredibly accurately and give that information to other folks to go clean it up? Is that what I'm reading? I mean, we're not running a fleet of cleanup satellites. Our Pono class satellites, Pono is kind of Hawaiian karma or, you know, the word for kind of doing the right thing in Hawaiian.

And we're headquartered in Kihei in Maui, Hawaii. The whole goal of these is to be able to sense and detect all the small stuff we can't see from the ground because we can only see about 10 centimeters from the ground. And then also provide developers capability looking down to see things with cameras, radio decks with radiation sensors because space weather is a big issue. So you want to put up satellites to help people find all the junk? Find all the junk and continue to do great things on Earth that require space to do them. I mean, John Doher just did this billion one donation to Stanford right for the Climate Center.

And his whole thesis was that climate is the next computer science that we will hack the Earth, we will hack the environment, and there'll be a new generation of people to do it. If that's true, and I mean, I can't help but think a good part of that's true, we're going to do it from space. I mean, we, you know, we screwed up the land, we screwed up the ocean, we screwed up the atmosphere. Now we're screwing up space. If we're going to fix this, and I think we can because I'm a crazy optimist, we have to do it one step at a time the way we screwed it up one step at a time. So we're enabling this context. You can't, as John Doar himself might put it, you can't manage what you don't measure.

That's right. Yeah. And that's exactly. So it sounds like you're describing. obviously a technological solution, which is the sensing and the satellites and the mapping of this kind of growing debris field, but also a little bit of a movement?

Absolutely, because we're big believers that, you know, if you look at the situation over Kiev right now, how many satellites were cameras looking down are overflying Kiev? It's quite a number. Why? If you have one camera to one particular resolution, why couldn't we share that to get the same image? Why would we have to task all those satellite assets to do that? And this problem is becoming more and more pervasive.

You know, universities put up cubesats quite often. You know, it's not rocket science for kids to put satellites in space. There are 10 centimeter cubes. And that's our minimum tracking resolution from ground-based phase rays. So guess what happens when the 10-centimeter cube is spinning? We can't see it anymore. Invisible. So we've become so privileged with our access to space.

We've done such a great job of getting stuff up there that we now have to to worry about putting too much stuff up there. The number one controversy has been low Earth orbit satellites, I believe. These are going to be absolutely amazing for humanity and spreading internet to all the places in the world where it doesn't exist. We're going to get another billion people online. So they're absolutely fantastic in terms of what they'll do for humanity. And my understanding is these are modern satellites. These companies know how to maneuver them in space. They're not junk and they have an exact plan for deprecating them over periods of time. So should we worry about low Earth orbits, low Earth orbiting satellites like Star Links and

Amazon's and everybody else's, or are they being done in a way that they'll just clean themselves up and it's not the same issue? I look, I mean, I think the, these big satellite constellation operators are trying very, very hard to be mindful of not screwing up Leo quite candidly because they have to operate there. Yeah. So it's actually in their own self-interest to make sure that we don't run out orbital carrying capacity or so that we can see the stuff so that they don't crash into it. And they don't create their own mini-Kessler effect of things hitting things and those

things hitting things. The interesting thing about this is that if you look at those capabilities that are proliferating Leo, a lot of it's focused on global communication to the planet. Some of it is now starting to look sideways. It's communication to space. And then there's all of the things on the ground that connect to these things. There's a lot of science going on in space. And there's a lot of one-off, I want to put my telescope in space or I want to put my

set of various sensors in space. That is more tricky in a bizarre way, because now you as a small satellite operator putting up one thing have to be really mindful of all of the other things. It's like crossing a highway by foot, right? You have to watch out for all the things that are already on the road. And the larger operators are still missing the underlying technology to do autonomous collision avoidance. So there's great companies like Kahan working on this to make sure that we don't hit

each other in space. There's also the challenge of conjunctioning. And there are a bunch of companies out there that are behaving like extortionists. basically selling conjunction services to constellation operators, taking people state vectors and telemetry data and trying to determine when are you at risk of crashing into each other? When are you going to bump into somebody else's thing? And then, of course, the intelligence, well, who's obligated to move? And where should we move?

Where's the lowest risk position? That stuff is coming, but privateer is releasing our own service we call RELSIC, which is Kessler spelled backwards. And we're not charging for that 20. 24 hours ahead, we're just asking space operators, please provide your telemetry and state vector. We'll provide the service for free because it improved the whole space community. We shouldn't, it shouldn't be optional to crash in space, right? This shouldn't be a market. This should be a technology that helps humankind.

So that'll be open source in a way, like an open data project where everybody self-reports where they're located. You also have the trash located. So essentially you're making like open maps, the open mapping project on planet Earth that a bunch of people can contribute to. That's right. And if the byproduct of that is, you know, Molly's in a dorm room and she's decided she's going to do the next app

to track dark fishing, illegal commercial fishing in the ocean, and she needs a camera looking down for those boats, and she needs an image classifier, and she needs a radio antenna, we can provide her that capability through an API so she doesn't have to launch a satellite, and she can use that for a tenth of the cost of what it would cost her to do anything in space.

And then the number of operators that are being mindful and thinking about how to not pollute space anymore can manage that infrastructure without adding additional risks and challenges to the bucket. Right. I feel like we should note here that one of the things it sounds like you're arguing for is a little less redundancy in space, that not every company needs its own set of satellites, not every researcher needs its own satellite, which would rely on the companies that already have satellites there sharing.

that data. Is that that's right? I mean, 80% of the stuff that goes into space, it really is the long tail, right? 80% of the capabilities, the same capability, but we all have been putting it up because we couldn't figure out how to share it. The 20%

are the bespoke sensors and the instruments that science wants to put up there to do something very unique and they need to test it. It's all super relevant, but it's not 80% of what people using space assets want to do with them. So we're helping kind of bridge that gap to get the 80% of those resources to be available and shareable by everyone, not just on our own satellites, but if you have a capability and it's in a place where people want it, please work with us to provide that to that capability to developers through APIs that they can call those resources from.

And that way, we don't have to put up more. And to your point, we need to share the services up there. So if there was a service level in space for cameras, you know, and other services, this could be eventually like Amazon Web Services in space. And that's what you plan on building. That's right. And Amazon and Microsoft and Palantir and others are already on that heading that direction. But if you go to privateer.com, just like stuff in space, you'll see, you know, all of the

catalog info on all of the things on orbit, all of the things circling Earth. But there's a little party piece. announce it, if you go and look at any asset that you click on that's an orange dot that's active, where we have more than one source of tracking data, you can also see the deviation, which is another reason we exist. The average deviation in the lowered space catalog, all the assets and all the people tracking them where we think they are, the average deviation is 200 kilometers. How do you dock with something? How do you get a trash truck to a trash can if you don't agree on where the can is? It might be 200 kilometers away from where you think it's going to be.

So this is actually a good, if you click on, you were just on a Planet Labs flock a second ago. And you can always do this. What is a block? So Planet Labs has cameras that look at Earth and image the entire Earth every day. Right. And if you look at any of these, you know, satellites, like if you click the show filters at the top left, now you see on the screen, you can see that there's a, number just moving slowly across your screen that says two.

Yeah, in the middle of the planet. Yeah, if you go into the middle of the planet and just zoom in where that number two is, keep zooming. Oh, there you go. Now you'll notice that there's a gap between one and two. And it's a pretty big gap. It's like, you know, 70-ish kilometers. What that gap is demonstrating is the data that's up on the right-hand side of your screen.

Number one is the high-resolution United States Space Communications. tracking data. So that's some of the best tracking data we have in government. Number two is the onboard transponder that Planet Labs has on their flock satellite, which is a camera looking at Earth. And if you look at that data on the right-hand

side of the screen, you can see orbital speed, mean motion, and period. If you scroll down on the right in that little box, you'll see the same data. So you'll see like 96.6 minutes, orbital period, 7.6 kilometers a second. So the one and two represent the same data set in theory.

Two different data sets for the same device. For the same device. That are off by about 70 kilometers. Okay. I got it. I'm guessing that the gap just from what we're seeing on the screen, I'm not actually doing that math in a spreadsheet. But part of the reason that that gap exists is you can see here we're 0.6 degrees off on argument of perigy.

So Planet Lab says 144-9013 and above it in the space command catalog, we can see 144, 3247. So we don't agree at this particular moment where the heck this thing is. So how would you rendezvous with it? How would you connect with it? We also don't know things like spin rate or tumble rate. So we don't know how fast, let's say that the object was uncooperative. It wasn't sending us data.

How would we know how fast it was spinning or tumbling? Would we know if we could reliably dock with it? So all of these questions require on-orbit capability as well as ground-based capability. But you can get all of this data from as many sources as we'll provide it to us for free in this free version of Wayfinder at private tier.com. And then we've got Wayfinder Pro coming very soon here that has private sources of tracking. So other companies like XO and New America and others that can work with us to try to find a way to provide that tracking data to developers,

you know, they still earn a profit. Space gets safer, and we don't put as much stuff up. Yeah. Pretty amazing. I mean, I just, in this drop-down menu, you have at Privateer. If you go to the second one and you pick the constellation of Starlink, Molly, you can just see, like, how many there are. So you just show the data sources all, and then you go to second one, Starlink,

and it's like, oh, my Lord, they have a lot out there. And a lot of them are, I guess, you know, because they're flying in orbit, you know, you could see many of them are over the ocean for large periods of time. So you would think that that time... That's wasted time when they're over the ocean unless they're servicing boats, I guess. So if I'm looking at that, and that's All Starlink,

I am asking, I think, the question that you're asking, which is why does anybody else need any up there at that point? So like, to what extent... I mean, sure, right? Yes, bandwidth. But what I wonder is to what extent our company is going to have to cooperate with each other to make space for their own, safe, for their own operations, and our, you know, future ability to travel to space.

It just depends on what you want to do with them, right? I mean, the obvious killer app right now is startling. It's communications facing planet Earth. Yeah. But there's a whole lot of non-obvious applications. I mean, we still have, we don't really think about our GPS assets very often because they just work. but if we end up with a clouded debris that's kind of like a virtual denial service attack in space

or if we lose certain capabilities over certain areas because those particular things have become damaged or were attacked intentionally it's really dangerous and there's also things that we want like we have a lot of sensors looking at earth for climate science and we're doing oceanographic research atmospheric research all that's coming from space when alcourt gets on stage and talks a lot about the inconvenient truth and where we are with climate studies, you know, one of the things that's generally left out is how much of that work, how much of that science we do from space.

So space is not just the next. I want to be super clear. I'm not arguing against Starlink or the ability of us to launch these satellites. I'm just saying is part of privateers mission to say there may be times when you company should collaborate instead of be redundant. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely.

Like share instead of launch. Share instead of launch is definitely Model 1, right? And we want to take advantage of it too. I mean, we're everybody's customer that we can be to use that data. Yeah. And we're not trying to be hypocrites. Let's talk about the militarization of space. Because there's a lot of actors who, you know, maybe aren't the most trustworthy or haven't been as upfront with us.

There was this 1967 outer space treaty that, We agree we wouldn't put WMDs, weapons of mass destruction, nukes in space. But of course, military satellites are everywhere, but therefore monitoring stuff. Are people putting weapons in space today? And what is the community think when you guys are talking to each other, not like publicly, but you know, you're at some conference. People have a couple drinks in them. The Russians, the Chinese, they got weapons in space.

Do we have weapons in space? What do you think? I mean, we know that there are. And the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency published a report not even a month, well, it was it a month ago, maybe a month ago. But it goes over the various types of weapons that certain countries, especially, you know, those countries that there's a lot of concern about, you know, China, Russia in particular. I mean, I would say, you know, India potentially having more capability there than people would feel comfortable with. how many different types of weapons there are that are already in space. We also have an app on Privateer that will be launched here in 60 days called Comply,

which just tells you how many satellites that are on orbit are in or out of compliance with the International Space Act and treaties. We're not doing enforcement, but unfortunately for us, nobody's doing enforcement. So the lie in the Outer Space Act and the treaties is that everybody is required to sign it that goes to space. So we all sign the same thing saying we will not put weapons in space. We will not do certain things in space. But it sure seems like some people kind of had their fingers crossed behind their backs when they did it. Because we as the space community worldwide have done some really horrible things in space. And there's also a number of assets that have violated the Space Act and treaties just out of greed.

Because intent is really hard to prove. But hey, if your satellite has 5% of the fuel left, do you want to move it to, a graveyard orbit with dead things, or do you want to leave it in place and just pray you can use it until it goes out of fuel because that's money for big companies? Yeah, I mean, if we look at ICBMs, intercontinental. This is like these things can get anywhere on the planet in an hour or two and blow stuff up, at least according to pop culture and war games. But if you put nukes in satellites, they just got to go down.

They don't have to go back up, right? and going up to a lot of fuel. And then I guess the Russians blew this thing up. So they blew it up with a missile? Or did they just send a kamikaze-style satellite at it? Was there actually explosives in it when they blew that satellite up? Or do you not need explosive? You just go really fast and you just crash a big mass into another big mass,

and that's enough. You don't need a bomb. Well, this is actually kind of the one of the worst parts of this is that, you know, we do have pretty good intelligence around things that happen in space. But when this happened, the Russians knew that there's no enforcement body. I mean, a lot of us will chastise them and say, this is a horrible, horrible thing that you've just done for all of us. It's a really dangerous and stupid thing. It's even dangerous and stupid when you have your own cosmonauts on the space station, which is now at risk because of what you've done.

I can't imagine being one of those cosmonauts on board and having your other crew members and comrades go, what the hell? I'm sure that they didn't know. I'm sure that the Russian government didn't give Roscosmos a quick heads up before they decided what they wanted to do. But the missile that they launched was off of a boat.

They sent it up and they also the crazy thing is what do we know and what did we not know? It wasn't even on our scope of tracking. It was over Russian airspace when it happened. So what did we see? On our ground-based phase ray, we saw many, many dots where we once saw one because the explosive charge resulted in chunks of things, right?

So we didn't even see the explosion. It's not like we have a playback video or a forensic capability in that part of Russian airspace. So we couldn't unwind it and say, oh, wow, a missile went up and blew it up. How did we know that the Russians actually did it? Well, they actually listed and they did the responsible thing in their own airspace and they issued a notam and noticed airmen for pilots in the area that there was going to be a missile leaving a boat there that that morning and to just not fly in the airspace because, you know, hey, if you're in a plane, you could get hit.

Wow. So they actually publicly notified their own community that they were going to do this. They didn't say we're going to go below the satellite. They just said, we're launching a missile. It's fascinating. The Russians actually worked on a system called a FOB's bombardment system. And it's a warhead system that uses low Earth orbit. And just before reaching its target, it de-orbites through a retrograde engine burn.

It first developed a system as a nuclear weapons delivery system. I'm reading from the Wikipedia in the 1960s, one of the first Soviet efforts to use space to deliver nuclear weapons. In August of 2021, the People's Republic of China tested a weapon that combined a fobs with a hypersonic glide vehicle, like a kinetic bombardment system, but with nuclear weapons, fobs had several attractive qualities. It had no range limit. Its flight path would not reveal the target location,

and warheads could be directed to North America over the South Pole evading detection by NORAD's north-facing early warning system. It's crazy. And this is if you look at what you're looking at here in this, so this is the document I was talking about from DIA. This is only, I don't know, I think they published it in March. So these things are not speculative. These things are actually cataloged.

And in this report, you'll also see the volume. How many of these things have been launched recently? Where are they on orbit? And it's terrifying, right? And it should be. Because this is part of, and I am not a, you know, privateer is not a company working on these types of things, weaponizing space and so on.

I mean, this is totally opposite of what we like to see happen. But this challenge is if we knew where these assets were, right? Then what do we know about their capabilities? How many of these types of capabilities to grab an object and throw it somewhere or to blow an object up with an energy weapon from space? These are no longer speculative things that just happen in weird science fiction. They're things that are now being worked on and developed in science fact. That's pretty terrifying.

Yeah. Well, let's, yeah, I mean, let's tie this to your business. I mean, I would imagine that for you, in terms of launching that pro product, which I assume is paid, that's the business plan here, that governments must be clients. Like, how will you make money? And I would imagine that must be part of it, right? Well, we're focused on commercial space first. So we're working with Constellation operators like SpaceX, like Amazon, like others, who have their own things in space that have the same challenges. Now, their customers could totally be governments. And don't get me wrong, we're not turning away business from friendly governments trying to learn things about space environmentalism and sustainability and how to traverse space more safely.

They could certainly use the data to improve their own capability. but you know this is a this is an area where we're being very very mindful of how you pick who you provide services to you know we're not trying to be the gatekeeper say that there are bad people or good people but this becomes one of those things of you know what do you sell to Russia in this moment right or whoever is doing something that you really believe is a wrong in the world in the moment the flip side of the flip side of that is would we turn down Russian data? Right? I mean, that's a really hard consequentialist kind of argument. I mean, right now, even in the private tier platform, you'll find data from Vimple, from the Russians. That's important data tracking space trash.

Would we turn it away? No, we wouldn't turn it away. Would we be their customer? No, wouldn't be their customer. But, hey, anything that keeps the space environment more sustainable? definitely want to make sure that we do that. Amazing. We'll continue success with it,

and thank you for doing this important work of keeping the skies clean. Yeah. This is fascinating and so consequential. Thank you so much. Please come back and tell us how it's going. Tell us, as soon as somebody invents the big fishing net, scoop it all up. It feels like we're going to get to the point.

So you tell us. It feels like they get to the phone where there'll be drones, just zipping around space, find this stuff just while we're sleeping. Just pushing it into that atmosphere. Yeah. It'll be like a little wally picking up like a nut, a baltier, you know, like a coming soon.

A six coming to pier. You know, like whole bottle of, uh, by the way, I have to say, you could find Alex on Twitter at 234, 5, 6, 7, 8. I don't know how early you had to be to get that username, but. Well, it turns out at Jason was taken.

So, that was all those left. That's all those left. I had that Alex, I consider changing my name, but then I got at Jason. I traded. All right. Continuous success. We have a very special. I wish we had some music and like a fuzzy screen.

A very special OK boomer for you. This is like very soft reflective, but I did listen to half of it when they started talking about you. I guess the OK boomer group. group. Is Rachel coming on to talk about this? I didn't approve this or know about this, but I like it. I like taking the initiative. This week's OK Boomer.

Oh, okay. All right. That's a high-risk maneuver, but it came out well, so well played. I like you taking a little bit of risk. So tell us, what was your concept for today's episode? So on today's episode of OK Boomer, I got to speak to Fresh, your chief of staff. And I also got to talk to producer Nick and producer Justin.

We talked about everybody's path into how they got their jobs, their favorite parts about working at Twist and at launch. We even got to talk about how it was when Molly joined. So that was a really cool episode. And I thought it was a good episode to have air the week we were all going to be in Miami. See it to there. We're all hanging out together. It's lovely. What a good idea.

I listened to the Molly part. Molly, what did you think? I don't know if you listened to it yet. It was so awkward. I mean, it was like when you pass someone a note in class and then they read it right in front of you. Like it was, you know, it was very, I just tried to think of myself in the third person for a minute. And then I was like, I need to step it up in this master class and producing thing. You'll hear it.

You'll hear it all. But it was very lovely. All right. So it's a little inside baseball. But I think it does, it does, it's a people behind the curtain. But I think there might be some nuggets there of for people who, you know, are running companies, I think investing in young people in the early part of their careers. And I think young people investing in their own careers and taking it seriously.

is a really great way to run a business, a fun way to run a business. And it just requires both parties to buy in. And what I really liked about it was, it was great for me to hear because I don't do reviews and I don't like to talk to you all about compensation, all that stuff, I have people for that. But it was nice to hear that you all love it and you all love the challenge. And you like taking years out of your career path, which is what I tell people. If you come work for Maine, you're probably going to take five years, 10 years out of your career path. after you've worked for me for two or three years,

people are going to start trying to hire you because, you know, they're going to look at you as like, oh, J-Cal is good at spotting talent, probably my superpower, and good at mentoring talent or demanding excellence and, you know, giving you a little push there to do more than you maybe think you're capable of. And so pretty good.

I had dinner with Presh last night, in fact, who just started a special projects for me when he was 19, you know, marketing, building videos, and doing, you know, Simple marketing task. I know as my chief of staff and I've had a good conversation about that. And then there's a way to keep folks, which is keep them challenged. Number one, people don't quit jobs.

They quit bosses. And so keep that in mind. It's not the job or the company that people quit typically. It's typically the boss they quit. They just fall out of love with the boss and they don't feel inspired or maybe they don't feel respected or maybe they don't feel supported, all of those things. And I think it's pretty reasonable. And so you need to be challenged, but you also need to step up and you have to want it.

And both parties then are in a pretty good relationship. And then I also figured out how to keep you guys here for a long time. Do you guys know what that is? Yeah. What is it? Carrie. Is it? Carrie.

What is it? You haven't experienced yet. But presci poo got a little tasty poo, as did Nick. Freshy poo. Because we sold, we had an opportunity to sell some shares early in one of our breakout winners. we took the opportunity to do that and the way it works in venture is to tip cards

and this isn't, I don't think, in the episode, but if you have Carrie, which in a media job that doesn't exist, you know, at NPR or, you know, CET or, you know, the ringer, or maybe they get stock in, I guess, some modest stock in Spotify. Yeah, I mean, people get various, you know, types of equity or whatever. A bonus might be more aligned,

but it's not like a limited upside of owning equity in high growth startups. And so, you know, pressure was able to, you know, get a little taste of, one of those unicorns. And then, but we only sold 20%, and you invested over four years. So he probably got a percent, like 25 percent of 20 percent.

So then that means 25 percent of 20 percent would be 5 percent. So he has 20 times that amount backloaded. And then I said, and he was like, yeah, there's a lot of money waiting for me as I invested. And then I was like, and that's but one company. What if you wind up having three of those? Now it's three times. Now it's 60 times what you've already got. Now, what if those companies?

companies 10x from here, which is a possibility. Now it's 600 times what you have. And he had never thought about it that way. But that's really what you have to think about. These companies can 10X. I think it would also go down to zero. Well, generally don't go down to zero, but they could also lose 80%. It's happening.

Zero sometimes happens. But anyway, I think that's the long term. Well, it also keeps you around. And one of the great balancing things, I think, is employment in this country is what they call at will. But it's at will for both parties. You know, if you think it sucks to work here, you can walk at any time. And if I think you're not pulling your weight, we can fire you at any time.

And that's one of the great things about the American economy is that we have kind of taken what's best about America, the freedom, dare I say. I hope I canceled for that. And we actually codified it in employment, which is you're free to do, you can free to walk out the door anytime you want and you could get cut anytime as well. So it just, I wish healthcare worked that way, Molly. Where the health care wasn't tied to employment, that would be the big win. Because because health care is tied to employment.

All the entrepreneurship, all of it. Would allow people to move more freely. You know, a lot of people, you don't experience with young people, but you and I experience as Molly with children and families. You know, the first thing you have to think about when you're changing jobs is health care. Yeah. What's my health care situation going to be? How do I get that work that out?

Oh, what was my health care before? And it's like, should we really be making people think about that in 2020? Like, there should just be a base safety net. This is really, and you know who agrees with this? Paradoxically, ironically. Ironically. No, David Sachs. Yeah.

You know, my best friend, one of my best friends in the world for a long time. And, you know, people are like, oh, he's crazy, right wing, whatever. And it's like, he believes in, you know, universal health care. Well, it's funny because people don't know. I know we're like a little off the rail. right now and what is happening. But my financial advisor, we were having this conversation about it.

Like, he's pretty conservative. We were having this conversation about health care. And he's like, well, they have that. It's Medicare. I was like, no. Like, he literally thought, sincerely believed that Medicare exists. He thought we had a universal layer of health care available to anyone.

We have for some people, not for the elderly and for people who are extremely disabled. Like, it was such a weird. But I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. because he was complaining about Obama and the, you know, the Affordable Care Act and whatever. And I was like, honestly, we'd be better off if he had gone all the way and made that, you think that the thing that they were trying to accomplish already exists, which is why you're not. And then he was like, oh, yeah, no, that should totally exist. I'm like, Medicaid is designed for people with limited income. Medicaid is designed for people of limited income, but very limited.

I mean, it's not. Like, he was like, oh, I just thought everybody had a base layer no matter what, like backup. And I was like, yeah, no. anyway. The income limit for Medicare's income limit is $1,200. I mean, that's $14,000 a year, folks, for those you plan along. Yeah. For a married company, it's $1,700 if the last I checked.

Exactly. Like, we can afford to have a base level of health insurance available to everyone, and we should, and it's such a weird. But what's amazing is, like, when people are just like, oh, I thought we already had that, because it seems so obvious. Well, you know, and I think we have to negotiate better, you know, There are countries like Canada where, you know, I was talking to somebody in the pharmaceutical business and they're like, yeah, we just, we're in a standoff with Canada because they won't pay us for our drug, you know, whatever it is, $100,000 for treatment. Now this is a really important drug for a small number of people. And Canada's like, yeah, $100,000, sorry, can't do it. They're just some hardcore negotiators like, you will do it for 40, you know. And it's like a big gap between the two numbers.

They're like, well, America's paying 120. And so we can't pay you 40. And they're like, okay, well, I guess we just won't use your medicine. Somebody in Canada is actually watching the store. And that's where, like, having a customer would be so important. You either need to have some crazy negotiator or you need to have a customer. You know, if people, you know, this is where co-paying and having people, having all the pricing on websites. Like, you know, when you go to a SaaS company, they don't tell you the price. Like, every doctor should be required on their website to have slash pricing. And it should be, here's our pricing.

And then all that pricing should be in a database. So if you say, hey, I got to get knee surgery. And people do this for elective surgery. If you wanted to get, you know, what do they call a nose job, rhinoplasty, if you wanted to get a nose job or, you know, liposuction, those people are, you know, because it's elective, people shop for that. And people go to Korea for it. They'll go to Mexico for it.

You know, I don't know if I recommend Mexico, but Korea is, you know, a little sketchy. Watch it. I'm just saying, I know there are situations where, like, it may not be the most robust solution, whereas Korea has like the best plastic surgeons in the world according to what I've read. Not that I'm considering anything here. You know, I'm not considering anything.

You know, you could people, basically what I'm saying is people shop. Whereas like, does anybody shop for knee surgery? I didn't. And then I found out my knee surgery was like, whatever it was, 50 or 60 grand to just get my minuscule. I mean, I didn't pay for it. So I was like, I'm not the customer here. It's my insurance company's a customer. Yeah.

you know, screw them. So it's just dysfunctional. Okay. So let's go to OK Boom. Thanks, guys. OK Boomer. I understood the assignment.

All right. Thank you guys for joining. This is a very special segment of OK Boomer. For those of you who don't know, Fresh is Jason's, Jason's chief of staff. Justin and Nick are the other producers on the show with me. Thanks for having us.

Can you guys introduce yourselves a little bit? I want to hear like a fun fact. Um, all right, Justin, go ahead. Oh, man. Throwing him under the bus. Uh, I'm Justin. I'm the producer that publishes this show most days. And I help find a lot of guests.

And a fun fact about me is I Peloton every day. Oh my gosh. Yeah, that's a fun fact. And I could probably, I haven't met another person that could be. me. But I know there's plenty. Prash. Prash, how do you feel about that? No, I'm terrible at Peloton. Okay.

But, yeah. No, that's great. I can go next. I'm Prash. Yeah, good, good. I'm Jason's chief of staff. More recently. Previously,

was working on, well, I started at launch, working on marketing stuff, then transitioned onto the investment team, more focused on the accelerator. So, like, looking for early stage companies. And then now chief of staff, which is like, I'm still figuring out, I don't really know what the role is. Like, get done guy. Sort of, yeah.

Yeah. But it's a ton of fun, just like managing different projects that Jason's working on. And he's an idea machine. So, you know, there's always something fun. Um, very cool. But yeah, that's me. Oh, fun fact. Oh, I, um, I don't know.

This is fun fact. This is top of mind. I have, like, really bad posture. And so I just started seeing a chiropractor. And, um, I have to go in like two days a week now. And I'm on this like monthly, like, or weekly, um, adjustment thing. And so I get my back to accept up. Let me know if you think it's a scam or not.

I've watched so many chiropractor videos on YouTube. Yeah. I'm not here on chiropractor TikTok. Oh, is that a thing? Oh, yeah. Do you, are you one of those people, though, that gets skeved out by hearing people's, like, backs crack? No, no, no, I don't know.

I love it. Yeah, me too. It's like, it's like dopamine hits my brain every time I see one of those videos, but I, I'm with Justin. If this weekend startups switch to a chiropractic YouTube channel, we could probably two X within the next two months, easy. Fresh, pitch that to Jason. Next day he has.

Be like, listen, listen, listen. All right, last one over here, Nick. Um, hey everybody. I'm Nick. I work on these weekend startups with Rachel and Justin and Jason and Molly. I'm having trouble thinking of a fun fact. I'll be totally honest with you. I don't know

that there's anything. I mean, I'm sure there's something, but you had us do that on the fact. The job has totally taken over his life every free hour. It's now thinking about producing content. No, I like, I enjoy my weekends. And I try to have all of you enjoy your weekends as well. I try to not bother anyone at all.

over the weekend because I know that you guys are going, I don't know, 12 hour days during the week. So I'm like at least let them have some Saturday Sunday time. You guys, what time do you guys go to bed? Go to bed? I normally end at like 10, 9. Okay, but I see like group chat messages. Oh, those are crazy. I'm in Pacific time.

So it's like 10, 11 p.m. sometimes. And you guys are still like chatting it up in the group chat. Justin and I have like a weekend, have a weekend talk to. Justin and I have a nice weekend chats. But once the all-in summit's over, hopefully, that the sleep schedule will get up back on it. Yeah. It's always interesting with events

because this is just like a new job on top of your job already. And then you just have to fit it in somewhere. Either on your weekends or on your weekends or it gets it. Yeah, the last couple of weeks leading up to an event is always insane. And that's where we are right now. for the people listening. Yeah, and you and, so this will go out the week of the Allens Summit. We've all met each other before, which was crazy awesome.

I think I've met Nick and Justin maybe one or two times, maybe three. Prash definitely only once, but it was amazing, nonetheless. So really excited to see you guys again. We're recording this on Wednesday, May 11th. Fresh is already in Miami. Jason just left to Miami and the rest of us will be heading out on Saturday. What are you guys like most excited for for either the Allens Summit or our little team retreat happening afterwards? Pressure I'll let you pioneer that.

Okay. Yeah. Most excited. So this is, we talked about this kind of a bit earlier with Nick. This is like the first conference we've done where, I mean, it's, it's no secret. Like we're selling tickets for $7,500. And most of the audience is like fund managers of capital. and then outside of the scholarships and stuff, which were discounted.

So, I mean, the conference has made a lot more money than we typically do for conferences. And so we're just able to do way more blusy things. So, like, parties are probably going to be crazy. Like, I've never been at launch where we've done just, like, insane stuff, like, the themes of the parties, the first nights. And how long have you been working at launch? Because I think, have you been working here longer than Nick has? Slightly. You know, like a year longer, right?

Yeah, I think a year. But me and Nick, we should talk about my next, like, interaction. Yeah, we have intertwined origin stories. Okay. So how long have you guys been working here, total then? Me, I started October 2017. We got to pivot the conversation because you actually got your job in a really cool way, right? Yeah, sort of.

Basically, yeah, so I had listened to this weekend startups. Just was interested in tech from a young age, and so found the podcast, and then I was in university at the time. But after my first year, I was just like, this isn't for me, and I was, like, failing most of my classes. And so I knew I couldn't go back, or else I just would have delayed the whole college. process.

And so after first year, I was just like, all right, let me just send a bunch of emails to people that I admire or that I'm like interested in learning more from. And so sent like hundreds of emails that summer. One of the person or people was Jason because I'd listen to the other, say who one of the other notable people was. Oh, was it Gary? Is that the one of your, yeah, yeah. Oh, so actually, I had talked to...

There's an alternate universe where Presh is going to garage sales and ripping off old people flipping cards. VaynerMedia, number one intern. Love that was, I was really trying to... Actually, I was more interested in that than working for Jason. Obviously. Do that my other job offer was at Sasha, which is like VaynerMedia is like... Oh, no way. Yeah, yeah, same thing.

That's so funny. That's hilarious. Yeah, so I... had, I actually got an interview there, but it wasn't like interviewing with Gary. It was like one of his team members. And I remember I took this like iconic photo of his like sitting in Gary's office and posted out my Instagram and it felt nice. But didn't get, didn't get an internship there. But anyways, yeah, sent a whole bunch of emails out. And then, you know, Jason was like one of the, and he's like, he's like known for this. Like he's so good at

email. So I just sent him an email And like within three minutes, he responded I sent him a huge thing like pitching an internship And then he responded like two things He said, what are your skills and what do you hope to accomplish in life? And then I sent him this huge email in hindsight It was terrible because he didn't read it

But then he had this tweet like a week later or something And this was around the time that is book Angel came out. And so he tweeted out, tweet a selfie of you and my book, and maybe we'll pick you to come watch Blade Runner 2049 in San Francisco. And so he made that tweet, and obviously I'm like trying to do anything that can to get in front of him. And so I do that. I tweet up the photo, me in the book. And then a couple minutes later, he puts me in a thread with his assistant Jess at the time. And she's like, cool, do you want to come out this Thursday?

And it was like a Sunday night there. And I mean, I was in Toronto. I'm from Toronto. And so I like book my flight ticket that night. And it was like my first time to San Francisco. And it was literally like a two-day visit. I was staying in like a hostel. USA.

Shout out USA hostels. Crymiest place ever. New sponsor. New sponsor for the show. I've got to interject here. And if you're liking this, this story from Prech, you have to go into YouTube after this. Yeah. And type in going to San Francisco question mark.

Woe hashtag number one. And you're going to find one of the best vlogs of all time. It's Prash J's blog. It's Prash documenting this exact experience, the full sequence. I watched it before joining. And it was, I was like, Should I take this job? Because I was at a consulting company before.

And I was like, I want to learn everything about it. And Prush actually is the leading content about making and choosing a job at launch. So I'll let you continue. You did the USA Hostel thing. And now you're actually going to the meeting in SF, right, Prash? Yep. Yeah. That's amazing.

Justin, they watch that. But yeah, so staying at the hostel, the movie's on a Thursday night. I go out. There's like 30 people there. And we met up by the CafeX machine at the AMC and the Matriot in San Francisco. So I was like super excited. It's like my first time in San Francisco. I'm like, yeah, this is so cool.

I'm seeing CafeX. I just read about this robot machine. Robots making coffee. Whoa. Living in the future, bro. Yeah. Although I was so dripped out when I got to S.F. I was like, yo, what?

This place is so trippy. Because I was like in like a terrible area. I probably was in like tenderline area or something just because that's where all the cheapest like hotels are. And so anyways, get to the movie theater. There's like 30 people there. I'm like super introverted. So I'm not like going up to people and like talk to them. But I do see a familiar face.

and I, because of the podcast and, uh, but basically I see, um, the founder of superhuman there. And I, I only knew his face because I had met his brother doing like an onboarding call at the time, um, when they were doing the personal onboarding and the team was like 10 people. And so I was like, hey, I know your brother. Um, uh, and like, uh, I loved the product. And so we got, we got chatting there. And so that was cool. That was like my first like interaction was like a, uh, Silicon Valley founder

and so met Rahul there and then Jason comes in meet Jason I shake his hand and like said hey Jason like great to meet you I'm like the guy who flew from Toronto just to like make sure he remembered who I was

and he's like oh cool we talked for like 30 seconds but didn't really like talk about job or anything like that and then you know other people wanted to talk to him and stuff and then we went to watch a movie and then that was I enter that interaction. But what came of that after that movie?

He sent me an email. He was like, we have this conference next week called LaunchScale. If you want to come and help out for that, we can figure out what you do during the conference. And then after it maybe give you a project to work on a remote. And then if you're good, we can hire you kind of thing. So ended up doing that, flew back out to launch scale, met Jackie.

She was the first person at launch that I met. Jackie, Incredible. And then just helped out, did whatever. It mainly did, like, social media at the conference. And then, yeah, after the conference, ended up meeting with Jason. And he was like, all right, well, I'm going to give you this project to work on. It's to organize 30. It's so specific, as Jason, you know, as Jason's ideas are, it was a,

I want you to organize 30 dim sum meetups across the U.S. for my book. I was like, awesome, cool. I had no idea what to do, but I was like, he literally made me do the same thing, not with dim sum, but he was like make 100 meetups this year across the world. Right when I got here, this guy is a playbook. It's almost like he knows what he's doing or something. That's so funny.

So here's a funny, but you actually started doing that, and you actually did it. I didn't even get to do it. He was like, he gave me the project, and then I flew back home, and then he calls me. And I was like, one, I didn't even know how he got my number. But he calls me on the phone. I'm like, freaking out, I pick up. And he's like, hey, it's Jason.

I'm like, hey, what's up? And then he basically was like, hey, my head of marketing or head of growth at the time, he just handed in his two weeks. so I'm looking to hire for like a marketing role and so if you want it, it's yours. You can work remotely and we'll figure out a way to get you to SF. Because at this point in time, he was like no remote and everyone was like in the office.

So yeah, I had to, I just skipped out that whole process of setting up these dim sum meetups and got the job. job. But I started working as a contractor because I was Canadian. And then, you know, long story short, we ended up setting up like a Canadian office and hired a couple of Canadian folks. All because of you. Well, I mean, it conveniently worked out. And I got my visa. It was like, I mean, it was incredible because I got my visa through that process. Yeah. So yeah. Um, That's kind of the story of how I did it. And there's more, but I don't want to keep talking.

No. How did, so Nick, you guys said that your paths kind of intertwined. What's the story without then? So I joined launch in January 2019. So two years after you, a year and a half, I guess. Yeah. After Presh. And I had been working for launch.

That's when I joined full time. I'd been working on a freelance basis for a year. before that, working with Pressh every night. Well, night, my time. I guess it was night his time too, because he was in Toronto at that point. But I worked at Major League Baseball at MLB Network. I was an editor. And Jason reached out to me in like 2017 right after I graduated from college.

And he was like, hey, you know, can you edit clips for us? We need, you know, we only have one person working on this and they need to do the show. they can't do clips. And I was like, yeah, no problem. And I think I was getting paid to start like $15 or $20 an hour. And I worked nights. So at the network, you know, baseball is on at night and on the weekends. So I worked like, I think I had off like Mondays and Tuesdays or sometimes Mondays and Thursdays.

And I would work like, it was the worst schedule ever. But, you know, that's what you got to do when you start. But yeah, it was like 630 to 2.30 a.m. I worked and I would get home at like three. And then from like three to five, I would knock out clips. So my first interaction with Pressch was sending him clips at like 4.30 in the morning. And him replying to me like, hey, man, why are you up so late? Are you guys?

Or he was like, are you, is this like your morning or are you still late from yesterday? And then that's because I would send my clips to Presch. So that was my first interaction with him. And then a couple months later, if I'm remembering correctly, I think somebody left launched the person that was there. I don't know, I guess we shouldn't say names, but whatever. They resigned. And Jason was like, hey, do you want to come on full time?

And I was living in Hoboken at this point. And he was like, I want you to move to San Francisco. And yeah, I did. and I came on January 2018 Yeah No 2019 Sorry January 2019

And then I've been here since That's crazy And it was Yeah I moved out to San Francisco A couple months later And And Then Prash moved out

And then we were in the office together For like a year Just boisen out With everybody How different it is Is it, excuse me Working in office with our team versus remote?

like we're fully remote right now, for those of people who don't know, Justin, Nick, and I are all out of New York, which actually works well. We wake up before, obviously, Jason and Malling, we can write the news and stuff. Presh is out over in the Bay Area. What do you, what, like, differences do you guys see the most? As a media organization, we operate much more efficiently remote, candidly, being able to have people on different coast, waking up at different times, and sort of making the best content that they can in their own for,

you know, in the way that they're most efficient doing it, right? Because not everyone is most efficient moving up. And it also just, it lets us hire way more talented people and have just this way broader range. On the investment side, I can't really speak to it too much, but I know at least like, you know, if we were restricted to hiring only in San Francisco, you're not getting Charlie Cuddy, right,

who is the director of education, who lives in Nebraska with his family. He's unbelievable. And there's no chance we hire him if we were only in. I mean, I couldn't say no chance, but I don't think that he would have moved to San Francisco from his nice comfortable house in Nebraska with his family. I don't think that he would uproot his family to do that.

So, yeah, as a media organization, And it's more efficient remote for sure. Is it any, actually, yeah, like, Prash. So I guess your role has changed a lot now since you were working, because you went from marketing to chief of staff. That's kind of a big jump, which is really cool. Has your job changed a lot since you guys, since everybody, I guess, left SF.

It seems like a lot of people aren't based in SF anymore, whereas, like, the whole team was, like, your life's probably changed, like, dramatically. Yeah, as soon as, as I got to SF, And then, you know, we had the couple months in office and then pandemic and then everyone wrote remote. And then a lot of people left SF. And you're like, wait a minute. Yeah.

Why didn't you like move back to Toronto though? Why did you stay in us all? Yeah, it's a good question. I just liked, I just honestly liked SF and the outdoors and that part of it. But it honestly at this point didn't really matter. Well, I guess, I guess now. as as as as as as as as chief of staff it makes more sense that I'm kind of where Jason is but um prior really didn't I could have you know done whatever I was doing remotely anyways and most of my time at

launch was technically remote because I started off remote and then our Toronto team was still remote yeah and then so I only really had like in person um with the team end of like 2019 um but I would say same thing to just, you know, mimic what Nick said. Just what, like, feels way more efficient. In the office, I would, you know, Nick, too, would just, like, stay super late. Nick either was, like, editing or, you know, producing

or whatever it was on the twisted media side. And I would just stay late, just, like, either had meetings during the day and then just actually getting work done after hours. So most of the day would just, like, be at the office. versus now it's just way more flexible, obviously. With, you know, working from home, you can go to a coffee shop if you want or go for a run or, you know, do anything. Like, split your day. Or do your Peloton?

Or do your Peloton? Like, Justin, yeah. Justin, you've joined a couple meetings, like, on the Peloton, I swear. A couple. A couple. I've switched to writing the morning ticker on the Peloton. That's psychotic. You can get, like, a laughing.

top mount, which is actually pretty good. Because I'm doing like lower intensity training. But yeah, you can't really do that in the office unless you're like, instead of hit training. I like it. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Our schedule is a little bit different. We're not going to, I try to do coffee shops like in the morning during the day,

but I feel like when we're on recordings, I have to have like five million screens. Like my like five bachelion tabs open. So I feel like we're probably a little bit more strapped down to the location of like our homes. and wherever our big monitors are. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, just to give a tie the story together and where Justin comes into all this,

I started working and we were at, I think, two days a week, and very occasionally we do an episode with a week with three shows. And it was just interviews at that point, right? It was just founder interviews. We would occasionally do a news roundtable, like once every, two weeks or once every month. And then Jason wanted to ramp up to three and then we ramped up to four.

And then eventually, I think right around when we were at four days a week, I was like, we need to bring on another producer. Which is what Justin, when we brought Justin on. Amazing. That was what, the end of 2020? Middle 2020?

Yeah, actually started 2021 early. I think the job posting probably went out on January 30th or so. And yeah, at that time, it was like three to four days, most days. I think even when I joined it was three to four, but then that quickly got sold out. And the ramp happened pretty quick, I think, after I joined. Yeah, to consistent four and then consistent five and consistent six. And that's what led us to hiring Rachel.

Yeah. And trying to, you know, all of this stuff that gets done on this weekend startups is in we're trying to build a media organization. or a very lean, very efficient media organization from the ground up and kind of figure out what processes work best and which don't as we go. And the way that we've done it is we've scaled revenue and we've scaled output before we've scaled team. So a lot of ways that this works is, you know, an organization will create itself, they'll

raise money, then they'll deploy that money by hiring people, and then they'll scale up content, The problem with that is there's not always the demand for the content, right? Like the athletic, for example, which is a paid subscription for sports. They just, I think, had a massive, I don't know if they had layoffs or as part of their SPAC presentation. It came out that they're more like losing a lot of customers or whatever, but it's not going great over there. I don't think.

We did it the exact opposite way. We scaled up everything, made sure that there was demand. We sell out shows fast. we sell out shows first and then on the back end we figure out how to make sure that everything's awesome and then we can do everything. Yeah. So we're operating almost the exact opposite way

that an organization that would raise money first would work and it would hire people first. Okay. How do you guys feel about that? That workload doubling down and increasing before you have almost enough man. Obviously, we have enough manpower because we can make it work but I think it's made very evident on the call. but the time, like everyone's using their time, like, very, very wisely on this team because, like, you have to.

And even then, you're working kind of late. And then once it gets to a point where, like, you hit your breaking points and you hire another person, how do you feel about that as a culture? Hopefully before you hit your breaking point. Yeah. Hopefully, hopefully. I know the base camp folks, Jason Freed and DHS in their book, they say don't hire until it hurts, which is a pretty similar philosophy. I mean, they're all about like bootstrapping. I mean, not, but yeah, just kind of they decry the VC model,

which I think it makes a lot of sense for media businesses. There are some things where sprinting ahead definitely makes sense. But I mean, at times, sure, it'd be, it'd be fun to have loads of extra resources to just deploy at will. I think pressure was talking about how fun it is to plan the all-in conference when you're just, you have a lot of resources. Yeah. And I think we still give our partners a great deal. And some of them have been with us for a long time, which is awesome.

But it's definitely shown if you're interested in just like any entrepreneurship, not just startups, it's been a really good lesson on how to actually survive because there's other companies out there that are our peers and some of them that are doing some awesome things like on deck. But they just had a lot of layoffs. And I really don't, the only way you're getting laid off at launch is, as if, like, you personally are having difficulty getting the work done, I think, given at least the health of the business. So it depends on what type of company you want to work in. But it's been really good to learn how to run effectively.

And there are definitely tradeoffs you make, but it's been really cool to watch and learn. I totally agree. I feel like learning to do like a bunch of different stuff too. Like having a lot on your plate and having to learn all at the same time has taught me like not only at like things that are basic. Like this is my first job out of college. So it's taught me to do things like time management. But it's also taught me how like to be like a way more effective worker. I think like in previous roles, even at like internships and things like that.

Like I had a lot of wasted time. And by being able to have like a bunch. It's a daily show. Like you have to get all this stuff done like that day. It's not like it can wait until tomorrow and having that kind of like deadline imposed upon you. I feel like has made me like 10 times better of a worker overall. Yeah. Jason describes it as, or he likes to describe it as, you know, working here as a young person will, his goal is to increase your trajectory of your career, like skip 10 or 20 years.

That's what he wants to do. And I think that we've done a good job kind of curating, working. I'm sure on the investment side as well, but on Twist specifically, I mean, you're given agency almost immediately. Like Rachel, I think for you, it was almost like week two. You got that meetups project. And again, you know, you say first job out of college or, yeah, we really, really try. I almost want there to be no bureaucracy in this job for anyone that works on this weekend startup. because I've worked places before where there's a ton of bureaucracy and like awesome,

really cool, interesting things get stifled and then have to go through this processing machine where when they come out the other side, it's this just like totally mid like, eh, kind of thing for what it used to be at the ideation stage, right? So I think twist works best when there's a little bit of like creative chaos. and it's just like, is something interesting? Yes, boom, go, run with it, do it. Which I think is the stage that we're at now. And I think for young people working in that kind of environment,

which I'm sure exists on the investment side too, but I can't speak to it as well. It's different than a lot of first job or second or third job out of colleges would be. And we like it that way. Yeah, Jason does a really good job at hiring a bunch of young people. I think it could help.

People grow within the company as well. Like, Prashton, you have been here for quite a bit. So it's really cool to see everybody as, like, path throughout the company. Justin, I guess we skipped over you completely, though. How did you find the job? You didn't find it through, like, cold emailing Jason did you? I replied to a tweet. That's what I did, too.

The impetus. I was an occasional this week in Startups listener, probably listened to a lot of the great episodes. It's maybe four to ten a year for since 2018. And then I was listened to basically every all-in. And then Jason had tweeted about it at the time. I honestly thought he was looking for somebody to help out in a part-time capacity. I wasn't really fully aware of the ambition of the podcast.

to scale to more days a week because I think at that time I was still like, oh, they do two interviews a week. Maybe they just need help booking guests or something like that. I'd love to do that on the side. I was working a consulting job at the time. And once I started down the process, I realized that it was definitely not part-time and it was definitely full-time. So I kind of viewed it as going to business school of sorts because just the breadth of the company, companies we cover, then the types of content, like we did series in the last year, scaling your startup and startup legal basics and some of those other ones that are very on the educational side, the VC elements.

So that's why I ended up joining up. But yeah, I'm just following Jason from the podcast over the years. That's awesome. I also found the job through a tweet, but somebody else mentioned me, obviously, like I knew who Jason was and, like, what this weekend startups was. Again, also wasn't, like, a daily listener, like our beloved Nody gang.

Shout out you guys. And since you've been on, we haven't even mentioned. Molly Wood joined our team. She's the newest of the host, aka the only other host, with Jason. And it's definitely made our, for my role with producing,

I feel like I do most of the stuff with Molly, which is really, really fun getting more. work with her, podcast Hall of Famer, Molly Wood. And it's really, really cool seeing her. And Jason's discussion, especially as a recent, like, how do you guys feel about producing a show now having two hosts? I think it's made life easier, in my opinion. Yeah, for Molly, I mean, she's been incredible after joining just for, and if people are

using this as like a little peek inside the curtain, before Molly got here, we have zero, not Justin, not me, not Jason, have any history in like actual real, like, podcast media, nothing, zero. We're just like, I think that this is how you do things. Make it up as we go. Yeah, exactly. And we're like, yeah, this works. Seems like it working, so whatever.

And I mean that in terms of like actual output and then also like your input, like for staffing and hiring and how we should be allocating our time here, here and here. And when Molly came on board, I mean, it was just like, immediately she's like, okay, here are like, three things that are really easy that we can do. And by the way, she wasn't like, you guys are doing everything wrong. It was like, she came in and she was, I think I was like, please help us. Like, is this right? And she was like, yeah, this is, you guys are doing great.

But like this thing, this thing, this thing. And one of the things specifically that she said to do was each host should have their own producer. So Rachel essentially became Molly's producer. Now, Rachel does everything for this weekend startup. She does all the booking 100%, where if I didn't know that, I might have just done that or one of the three of us might have just done it as they came in. But now that Rachel's dedicated to it, you're almost getting like a masterclass every day from Molly on, I would assume how to be a better interviewer and host, how to do everything

on the back end and then everything else in between. Is that fair? Oh, totally. And I definitely think it's so interesting working under Jason first and then getting to work under, I work under both of them, I mean, but specifically getting, going from like having the just Jason as the host to then helping Molly out with that climate segment. It is so interesting seeing how differently they operate in the podcasting space. Like how Jason really is, like you can tell Jason's like a business guy.

and Molly Wood is like a podcasting pro. Not that Jason isn't like a phenomenal podcaster, obviously. He wouldn't, like, the numbers wouldn't be so good if he wasn't phenomenal at this. And not that Molly isn't like absolutely, not like Molly wasn't like doing stuff with MarketWatch forever. But you totally see where they shine differently. Like, for example, when we write for Jason, it totally differs for when I write for Molly.

Jason, like we have a, we're going deep in with the, deep in with the facts. There's like math right now here. We're doing behind the envelope math. It's like pretty intense, an intense note scene for like from 11 to what is that, like 11 to 1 every day. We're out. We're writing pretty deep. Whereas Molly, it's like bullet points a lot lighter. I feel like she wants to like interject with her own opinion without me like kind of putting my own voice in it as much as possible, which is really, really cool. Yeah. Justin, I'm curious with how think the, the dynamic has gone so far? Yeah, pressure and I had actually went on a run back in December when we happened to be

in the same place, like our second meetup ever. And on there, I joked about joining Twist at like a series B, which is kind of ridiculous because Twist is a very small company, but, and it's been profitable basically the whole time. So it's not really a startup. But I think that comparison is kind of right because I joined after the business model. or like product market fit had kind of been established, looking to add some additional streams and new elements to the show.

Like we still do at least two interviews a week, but now we're adding much more content for a daily listener. And one thing that you definitely see a lot of Series B companies start to do, which we just did, is you hire like experienced execs. Like the startup team originally might just be a bunch of scrappy young people or people who are like the disruptors, but there's definitely always something you can learn from the traditional incumbent industries.

That's why you see like an Uber, like maybe poached like Amazon and Amazon people to Costco people, etc. And Molly really comes in and brings that professional background from radio and just helps us add more structure to this because I think it is when you're a small team, especially when you're a small team with a, a lot of trust, maybe from working in the same place.

You can get kind of lazy about how you actually systematize things, which is great for experimentation, but as you try to add more people to mitigate problems, it definitely gets pretty chaotic if you don't have the right structure in place. So I think that that's been, it's been great to start to add structure and more dedicated responsibilities so people can actually, we can make sure we're making the most. most of our team and instead of like duplicating work or just working on things that that actually aren't going to push the show forward. So I really enjoyed that. I agree. That's awesome. What are your guys? So what do you guys hope to when you got this job were you like ever thinking

like, oh, this is like going to help me? Like I want to go over to the investment side. I want to go work at a startup. Like what was your guys is like main goal, I guess, of taking this job? Or were you guys mostly just focused like on the here and now living in the present. Press, you can go because you've been on me for a bit. Yeah, main, the really like, so when I first wanted the role, it was like, do whatever, just to make an opportunity because I knew it wasn't going back to school. So whatever that was, I was like down for. And then after, you know, working a year, it was more so like, I guess I started thinking

about more career-wise what I wanted. And I guess I like discovered, well, the one thing that's great about launch is like it's like a Silicon Valley boot camp. So you'll, and this was like one of the things, Troy, who was the marketing guy that had had quit at the time, which is how I got the role. He had told me because we had like a week or two together onboarding. He was like, it's like one of the best places to just get, you know, get your hands. basically get in the trenches and learn the world of Silicon Valley and startups. And so that was

super exciting to me. And with that, obviously, you get that experience on day one essentially working with Jason. But I would say, like, the thing that most excited me was just having a breadth of education in this world of startups. And I was like fortunate enough to get that with the different roles that I've had over the years. And everyone at launch really gets that, like, everyone has some involvement in each part of the business because they all overlap one way or another. So I think that's cool.

And then the other thing, which is cool, which is how Jason, like, started his career as well, which was, like, doing everything part of the business. And so he had mentioned, like, you know, he would, he, you know, learned how to take photos and stuff for, like, the magazine when he was producing, Silicon Alley Reporter and just basically added a whole bunch of skills throughout that process of building that business. And I feel like he's giving that opportunity for all of us just to keep

adding new skills. Getting to like 70%, we don't have to be perfect. Like you was mentioned, we can still hire experts, but everyone on our team is like super scrappy and can get to like 70, 80%, whatever the role is, which I think is awesome. And something that I just want to keep, you know, going on for the rest of my career. But yeah, nothing too specific, like still like it being broad, still like being scrappy. More of like a generalist type role

is for me what I like. Yeah. That's awesome. It's funny because Justin literally said, like this is like basically in place of business school. So the education thing, I think roles. I was definitely,

I actually just talked to Mike Savino with R-2020, like you're in a review. because I 100% on that same path where it's like I just want to learn as much as freaking possible and like who better to learn from at the time of getting the job. Like who's better to learn from than Jason besides now Molly Wood. It's like if you want to do something in media, if you want to do something in business, like really like these are the subject matter experts, which is like an incredibly cool experience. But I'm still on the like when I was coming into this role, I was like, I don't know if I want to do stuff in messing. I don't know if I want to do stuff in startups, like go work at a startup, or I don't know if I want to try to pursue podcasting myself, because at the time I did have my own podcast, which is since like kind of like taking the back burner. But really, really cool to be kind of like an inch deep and a mile wide at an organization that I feel like has so many different arms to it.

And one of the best things about being at like a small organization with so much going on is like you can kind of like hinted at this. like the amount of responsibility that's given to you is insane. Like the other day, Jason was like, yeah, you should probably like tweet more from the twist account. And I was like, okay, like, let's go. Like, okay, I can do it. Like, we'll figure it out. Or it's like planned meetups. And it's like, I've never even planned like a sorority event before, much less like a gathering in Japan with people I do not know in a Slack group that I just joined at a company that I'm very, very like, unknowledgeable in.

And the amount of like responsibility that's given to you at a fairly quick pace. is more than, I think, what a business degree could give you. Plus getting to learn all the vocabulary, like, during the show and hearing Jason and Mike and Molly and all the awesome people on the investment side, like, talk about the actual process in which, like, that goes is, you know, gives you some, like, practical knowledge. You want to wrap it up, Nick?

I think it's a good time to wrap it up. We're at all of them. Yeah, the original question was, like, what do you want to get out of this? Yeah, or what were you thinking that you wanted to, like, learn? Like, why did you take the job in terms of, like, did you have, like, were you interested in, like, making it over to the investment side? Or were you interested in, like, becoming, like, the best producer possible?

Yeah, it's an interesting question. I, uh, I didn't really think about that when I joined. I just, I wanted to, uh, it sounds super shallow, but this industry pays a little bit better than the industry that I was in. Yeah. And, uh, I like money. So that's why. I originally took the job.

And I was like, all right, if I don't like this stuff, I could always go back to sports. But I have found the challenge of learning and becoming or trying to become an expert on things that you know nothing about before coming or very little about before coming here. I found it really fun. And it's rewarding. There are times where, you know, you have to do something you've never done before, like go through an S1 or a quarter. quarterly earnings report and break everything down into a really simple, understandable, easily readable way that makes Jason or Molly look super smart when they say it. And if it's your first time doing that, you get graded like it's your 50th time doing that. And that makes you elevate your game quickly.

And that goes for a bunch of different things all across the organization. That's the kind of place that it is to work. And I found that to be something that I, even though it could be hard in the moment, when you kind of look back on it and you're like, wow, I can't believe I've done all of this stuff. It's great. That's true, too. In terms of like, I always say this and I like, well, this is probably beating a dead horse because I'm sure I've said this on like other OK boomer episodes. But like I think it's such a strong indicator of somebody being super intelligent or at least knowing what they do at a really deep level is like the ability to explain things in the simplest way possible.

and by sitting down and having to write things every single day. Not only is it like forcing us to understand what's happening in the tech community. Like we don't have a choice but to know what's happening in the tech community, in the market, in the world of,

you know, Silicon Valley. But we have to be able to explain it in a way that like a fifth grader could understand it. Because when you're writing show notes, like these aren't something that like this isn't like a teleprompter out here that somebody's necessarily reading word for word all the time. This is something that they're kind of like glancing out, reading, you know, creating, like, their own opinions on, on the fly.

It's not like we're out here, like, writing Jason's opinion and Molly's opinion. You know, they are obviously really smart people. So being able to write things in completely, again, like, a way that isn't going to sway them one way or the other. So it's understood by, like, a mass amount of people is, I think, in turn, like, definitely making me smarter and understand what is happening a lot better. And I think if you can't explain it in the simplest terms, like, if you can't explain something do an eight-year-old, then you shouldn't really be writing notes for people to pontificate it

about it to a really intelligent audience. And that's the standard that we hold ourselves to. That being said, I do think that Jason and Molly, when we have a topic that is like, not only do we not understand it, like experts are like, I don't really know what's going on here. Jason and Molly will say, listen, we don't really understand this. We're trying to figure it out in real time. here's what we know, here are the facts, here's what we think,

and then if you have any comments, like Jason always says, hey, tweet at us, if you know better than us, please let us know. And then we'll kind of incorporate that into our knowledge going forward. Yeah.

It's a reputable source, which I think is a good point. I totally agree. And it's nice having two, it's nice seeing them work out things together or understand things together and fill out the pieces. That's probably one of the big benefits

without having two hosts now. but yeah thank you guys so much for joining I know this is probably like a really interesting episode for most people didn't have on a Gen Z founder on this time but I thought it would be cool for you guys to see behind the scenes a little bit especially with the All In Summit happening this week and with our retreat happening this week

again getting to meet fresh for a second time going to be pretty wild pumped awesome so where can everybody find you guys on the internet besides at producers or besides producers at this weekend startups. You don't want to follow me. You don't want to follow Nick. Nick is an Annon.

Wildly uninteresting. Yeah. I'll plug mine, I guess. Justin P-40 or F-O-R-T-I-E-R. Nice. Twitter? Very cool, very cool. You can find that on all platforms.

Cool. And then Pratch. LinkedIn, Twitter, whatever. Are you going to drop your, like, YouTube channel as well? Nice. Yeah, I guess you can search my name, Prashton. That's come around YouTube. if you wanted to watch the vlog.

Yeah, exactly. Watch that whole woe series, actually. But seriously, I hope if you've made it this far on the podcast, and this is kind of a long, rambling one, you clearly like the show and you're clearly interested in launch and this weekend startups and all the stuff we're putting out. And it's definitely growing slowly or in a sustainable manner. We've really, I think probably 2X the entire audience size since I've been here,

which is kind of crazy to think about it. since it's big. But the team is growing. So if you're really passionate about startups and tech news and have made it this far, you should keep in touch. Make sure to follow Jason. Follow our LinkedIn postings from both launch. And I think launch is typically where we post them on LinkedIn.

And yeah, I would plug that intensely because he definitely is always looking to to help mentor great people. And as long as you have a will to work, this is a great place for you. Trying to fix our bed times. No, we'll find new things to do. Bed times is a moving target professionally. Awesome. Thank you guys so much for coming on.

This is a really cool segment of OK, Boomer. Maybe I'll get to talk to you guys like one-on-one in different episodes and dive deeper even into some of your guys' stories and excited to see where everybody goes. Thanks, Rachel. Bye, guys. See ya.