This Week in Startups - Rapid Disney+ growth, Predicting preference with Qloo's Alex Elias, OK Boomer: Zehra Naqvi's Z-list | E1384

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

Jason and Molly open the shown discussing Disney’s Q1 Earnings and the 37% increase in Disney+ subscribers (01:51). Then, Qloo CEO Alex Elias joins to discuss his AI prediction company (21:12). You will learn: 1. How Qloo uses machine learning to understand taste and draw cultural correlations 2. Why Qloo adopted an API business model and is focused on developers 3. Ways businesses and brands are using Qloo to improve customer experience and drive revenue To wrap, we have an “OK Boomer” segment where Producer Rachel speaks with Zehra Naqvi from Republic (45:21). They disucss Zehra's work at Republic as an investment associate (48:00) and how Zehra developed the Z-list to facilitate intros between startups & VCs (55:21). (00:00) Jason and Molly open the show, Disney Earnings, Alex Elias from Qloo, Rachel OK Boomer (01:51) Disney added 34% increase in revenue and 37% increase in Disney plus subscribers (06:56) Netflix vs. Disney on streaming growth (10:07) Revelo - Get 20% off the first 3 months by mentioning TWIST at https://revelo.io/twist (11:37) How different streaming companies cultivate and develop new IP vs. exploit existing IP (19:42) Assure - To get 20% off your first Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) visit https://Assure.co/twist (21:12) Alex Elias from Qloo, a company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to understand taste and draw cultural correlations (26:48) How Qloo is used by developers to make predictions (32:06) Ourcrowd - Check out the deal of the week at https://ourcrowd.com/twist (33:15) Qloo's business model and example use cases with large brands (40:10) How restaurant groups are using Qloo to determine the right music for their restaurants (45:21) OK Boomer intro, Rachel speaks with Zehra Naqvi from Republic (48:00) Zehra's work at Republic as an investment associate (51:09) The path to being an investment associate (55:21) How Zehra developed the Z-list to facilitate intros between startups & VCs Check out Qloo: https://www.qloo.com FOLLOW Alex: https://twitter.com/ape FOLLOW Zehra: https://twitter.com/zehranaqvi_ FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Okay, everybody, it's another Friday variety show here at this week in startups. Frariety. First up, we're going to break down Disney's Q1. Frariati show. First up, we break down Disney's Q1 earnings and Disney Plus, or Hoose, as we're now calling it. It's insane rise. And then I interview Alex from Clue, which is a really interesting API company that provides recommendation, algorithms.

You can give them a zip code and you can find out what music those people like. You can give the music. They'll tell you what fashion they like. And you can just pivot all around and figure out, hey, without personally identifiable information, what a person or a region might be interested in. It's really fascinating. Super cool. And finally, because you get it all on Fridays, another great edition of OK Boomer with producer

Rachel. Ah, Rachel reporting. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Revello. Looking to affordably scale your product development with global tech talent in U.S. time zones? Hire vetted remote developers in Latin America with Ravello. Get 20% off for the first three months at Ravello.io slash twist.

Assure is the leading provider of special purpose vehicles and fund administration with over 5,000 completed transactions and $2.5 billion under administration. Listeners can get 20% off their first SPV at Ashore.co slash twist. And Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR-C-O-WD.com slash twist. Disney announced their earnings for Q1 2022 after the bell yesterday and the stock popped. as much as 5% in the early window after a 34% increase in revenue and a 37% increase in Disney plus subscribers. So let's break it down real quick.

I'm just like I continue to be astonished by the growth numbers that these huge established companies continue to post over and over and over, like not even getting into the fundamentals. What is up with these companies growing 37, 41%. I'm sorry, what is the disconnect between like the economy not being good and these companies growing like, you know, series A startups? I think it is, they have incredible momentum, extraordinary products, and a massive war chest,

so they can really invest in a way that startups can't. So for a startup to hit these kind of growth numbers, it would seemingly be easy. Oh, you have $100 million in revenue. You only need to hit $100,000. You only need to add $40 million here. You have 40% growth on a very big number here. But I think they're getting more audacious,

and I think it has to do a globalization as well. So a lot of these products are now sweeping around the globe at a pretty amazing pace. So it's probably a multi-factor thing. But let's talk about the total revenue for Q1. 21.8 billion dollars, amazing. And the revenue from parks, experiences, and products jumped 2x year over year, 3.5 billion to 7.2.

Now this is mostly due to COVID restrictions, lifting, and people traveling more, so they probably were at a lower base. But that's only 30% of their total revenue. Q1, 2022 profit net income, the money they cash they put in the bank, $1.1. Which is way up over 2021 when they were basically breaking even. Disney market cap, $276 billion. So that's, you know, a small fraction of, you know, a $3 trillion, $2.5 trillion Apple. But, you know, it's still respectable for a media company.

The real story for me is the continuing growth of the streaming business, which I predicted would hit $500 billion at some point. I believe Netflix and Disney, all destined to have a half a billion paid subscribers globally at some point, and total streaming subscribers is now 196.4 million. Yeah. 130 million of them, 66% is Disney Plus, which is an extraordinary product that if you have kids,

you basically are going to have this until they are no longer kids, at a very minimum. ESPN Plus, the plus, is 21.3 million, 11,000. percent of the total. And Hulu, which I am a fan of. I love the product, except it keeps turning off when I travel because I keep switching locations, which is a horrible feature, so I might give up on that. Yeah, that's why, yeah, I'm not having that. And I know, and I use a VPN as well, and now they figure it out VPN. So they're just constantly turning my stuff off and like Hulu, send this clip to the product, Hulu manager product person.

Such an irritating. Like, come on. Just let me use it when I'm on the road. Yeah, you know that people are streaming on the road. That's why streaming is so great. But it is also, easy to forget, side note, that Disney owns Hulu. Like, it, it, so much of this earning, the, every one of Disney's earnings reports basically highlight what an octopus it is as a business and why it just continues to have all of these little, you know, growth engines. Yep. In there.

Disney Plus customers are getting a heck of a deal. You remember, they started this really cheap to get people addicted to it. So this is the low, low, low price. It's averaging four, 441. a month. Just a cup of mocha. Of course, you know, this has to do with the global market for these services. Netflix has a similar phenomenon. You can't charge in India the same amount in dollars or, you know, in other regions. So I think the U.S. subscribers are over six bucks and they're probably a little bit less in, you know, just other regions. You can look at

four bucks a month times 130 million subs. That's a half billy a month in revenue. I'm almost $600 million a month in revenue. So it's about $7 billion. That's just two years after launching. If this thing continues, insane. You know, there's no doubt in my mind that they could get this average revenue per user

up at least 50%, probably double. So I'm going to go with double. Okay. And, yeah, I think this is going to double and double. So double the number of subscribers and double the price. So that's four acts. You can see the making $30 billion a year from this very quickly

in getting into Netflix level revenue and therefore investing in. I think it's going to be May 24th or 25th is going to be the Obi-Wan series, Book of Boba-Fet slash Mandalorian. Season 2.5 was a huge hit and amazing. And so... Yeah, I mean, look, they're fast on their way to becoming America's only entertainment company. No doubt about it. It's just a hit.

Here's the chart. I don't know if you saw this chart, but Netflix and Disney, look at Disney from a cold start. You know, this is the kind of chart, you know, when you see Google versus Yahoo, you know, or, you know, Chrome browser versus Firefox or Firefox

versus Internet Explorer, and you start to see these charts when things overtake other things. This is an overtaking chart. This is a car in the review mirror catching up very quickly. This chart right here, remember a couple weeks ago when I said, if you asked me what my tenure holding, would be, it would be like Bitcoin over Netflix.

Like this chart is why. Yeah. I mean, that should be absolutely terrifying. And then you have Netflix out here raising prices. You know, Disney's still at whatever, six bucks. And Netflix is trying to go to 20 for the, you know, 4K. And it's like, listen, I understand that you have to raise prices at this point to just keep making this content because content is so expensive.

But like, when you start to consider value. Right. And where's growth going to come from? Where's growth going to come from? So that's where you're probably hearing Netflix say, you know what? We're kind of reaching a natural audience with a streaming service. You know, may continue to grow.

It could be flat, like Facebook reached when they reached, you know, maximum saturation in different markets. So you need an Instagram. You need a WhatsApp. You need a YouTube. If you're Google, you need Android. You need other properties to sell into the same user base. So this is where our discussion about Netflix having a gaming studio or podcasting or Spotify.

music can only take them so far. So they added shows and they bought shows and became a publisher of certain shows. Sorry, Daniel. You are a publisher. Now we're down to tech analyst Tane J, who had some good tweets in response to Disney's earnings on exactly at this point, comparing Disney's total streaming subscribers to Netflix, which are almost equal.

This does, this is inclusive, these numbers of Disney Plus, ESPN Plus, and Hulu. Yeah. But Tane writes, total streaming subscribers, Netflix, 221.8 million growing 9% year over year. Disney, 196.4 million growing 34% year over year. He then went on to mention the amount of Oscar nominations, my major studios in 2022. Because this had been one of Netflix's selling points, right? Like, we came along with streaming, we make movies, we have Oscar noms. Well, I think Netflix and Disney.

together now account for 60% roughly of the nominations referenced in the tweet. Netflix has 27 nominations and Disney has 24. So like not only are these two together kicking the absolute ass. I mean, Disney technically also movie studio, right? But they're destroying Warner Brothers, MGM, Apple, and Amazon. And Netflix can no longer claim a quality advantage. Yeah, I mean, what I see here with Netflix and Disney is they get many more shots on gold. They have committed to this so fully.

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And no offense, Adam Sandler, like the movies he's making on Netflix are going to be the number one movies, but they're not Oscar fodder, you know, and they're not Oscar bait. But they get so many shots on goal. I mean, how many unique projects, that would be one thing I would like to see as a statistic track. How many unique projects greenlit per year over time? So if somebody can do that and email producers at This Week in Startups.com, unique projects greenlit per year or, you know, actually maybe release per year. So titles released per year. How many oranges, the new blacks?

You know, how many euphoria is on HBO? How many of those things are they releasing? Because then you can say, you know what, we're just going to make these 50 titles every year just to sweep the Oscars. We're just going to do Oscar baiting to go up those lists and whatever that makes people feel good about it. But look at Apple and Amazon. I'm wondering if Amazon is committed to this space. I notice I don't go to Amazon Prime Video ever. I am watching the new Reacher series on Amazon Prime.

I got very – I want to see that, actually. That's actually, that's good. I got very excited when they scooped up the expanse. They're sort of like a – it's like a little bit smaller and tighter, maybe. Yeah. I do think, thank you, by the way. I was waiting for the chat because I was like,

there's some Adam Sandler movie that everybody went crazy for that was so incredible, uncut gems. That's one. And everybody thought it was totally unfair that Adam Sandler was overlooked for an Oscar. I was just waiting for that one to pop up. So thank you, chat, for reminding us. That there's one Oscar Bate, Adam Sandler movie.

But I do think that both what Amazon and Apple are encountering, and Netflix will continue to, encounter. And it's kind of a dilemma as a consumer, right? Because I don't want our entertainment universe to be sequels and spinoffs of the same IP for the rest of my life and my child's life, which is Disney's plan. They're just like, we've got IP for days. And it's like Taco Bell right now. They've got tortillas, meat, cheese, lettuce, and tomatoes. And they're just going to mix and match that sucker into, you know, it used to be a double-decker taco and now it's a chalupa. Like, it's a lifetime of spinoffs of the same content, whether it's Marvel or the Star Wars universe,

for example. And then Netflix and Amazon and Apple are trying to either take existing IP and adapt it or create all new IP, which is so hard to do. It is expensive. It takes so much creativity. But then from a consumer perspective, it's richer, right? It's a richer landscape in some ways. But when you're just looking at it as a pure business question, like if you've got a treasure trope of IP like that, you're going to win for decades. Yeah, I think that's Netflix and HBO Max's role in all of this. They seem to be less about mining IP and more about, you know, planting seeds for future IP.

And you're starting to see that HBO doing the many saints of Newark, you know, a soprano story they called it. So obviously they want to open up the Sopranos universe to maybe some more things. And they did the Sex and the City reboot, or not reboot, like, you know, whatever when they're in their 60s. Yeah. and so they have some modest amount of old content they can build on supposedly the entourage guys are going to do one. I spoke to some of the entourage folks about that.

So there's going to be an entourage reboot supposedly, which would be fun for people of the, you know, who liked that in the 2000s. But here is, so I do think that those two places, Netflix and HBO Max are going to be like the new stuff and then Disney will be the mining for gold. Yeah. Here it is. This is the Netflix chart. Thank you to the producers for producing in real time. If you're watching at YouTube.com, such this weekend, or if you're using Spotify, you click on video,

or you search for this weekend start this video in your Apple Podcast player or Overcast, you can find our video stream. Here's a chart. This is bonkers. Released titles by quarter, so obviously it's going to be a little spiky. You'd want to see a yearly one of this, and then I guess schedule titles. And I don't think they want to tip their cards too much. And I don't think they put a lot out there.

But you can see in Q4 of 2021, 129. titles release in the quarter, 90 days in the quarter, they're releasing one point, you know, three things a day. So every day you're getting some new series or movie on Netflix. That's pretty, pretty amazing when you think about it. They're averaging a hundred, about 110 new original releases per quarter per quarter over the past few quarters. I mean, that really, that is banana. More than one a day. And these things take years to develop, right? no wonder they're raising prices I'm here for it

I'm here for it you know like it's absolutely fantastic that more artists are getting to create things I think you know if I'm Amazon or I'm Netflix I'm thinking maybe we should do Netflix sports or Amazon sports

and you know this ESPN thing like maybe there are some niches in sports they could compete for to build out right and there was this whole rumor that Amazon Amazon did buy some Thursday night football games for a bit. There were rumors that Google was going to buy the rights to the entire NFL at some point. Because they were going to, when they were doing YouTube, they were going to do this Google video, and then they bought YouTube.

And then there was like, maybe they'll bid on football. I mean, if you've got all these billions of dollars sitting around and you lose five or ten billion dollars on NFL rights for a couple years. Yeah. Like, does it matter to Google or Apple? I mean, if Apple owned the NFL? Yeah. What's that sports? Why can't I think of the sports outfit that the New York Times just bought?

And we were like, that's a miss by Disney because they could have, the athletic. So Netflix could conceivably have bought the athletic. Granted, they don't necessarily need a print outfit, but they could have done that to turn it into like a sports streaming vertical to compete with the SPN, which is increasingly one of the losers in Disney's portfolio. And that would have been interesting. Yeah. I mean, I think that, I don't know, like just pouring money into that sheer volume. of content forever is going to be a tough strategy. Like Netflix may need to diversify in some way.

Either Netflix or Amazon or maybe even HBO Max at some point, they're going to see what Daniel's doing at Spotify with Joe Rogan and call for daddy and some of those properties. And be like, no, thank you. Just kidding. No, I think they're going to look at those and go, wait a second. They're getting large viewership. They're cheaper, right?

Like, what is 20 or 30 or $40 million a year for a podcast? but if it gets the same viewership as some of the Netflix shows, somebody over there is going to have an aha moment where they're like, same viewership, half the price, or similar price? Maybe we should just buy Joe Rogan. Maybe you should just buy, call her daddy, take the ads out and make it part of the subscription, right?

And that could be super accretive. And I remember when Netflix first started, they were buzzing around, and Amazon, when they started video, they were buzzing around the web show podcast community. Like, you'd see them at events. They were talking to people. But I think they just wanted to do the Oscar high-end stuff. But now that the podcasting community and the web shows have gotten better,

you know, like, what's the difference between watching Bill Marr every week or all in? Or this week in startups and CNBC tech check? Like, is there a difference anymore? Same guests, same hosts, same quality. You know, it's kind of like, you know, the difference between you watching what we're doing here at 10 a.m. every day and watching CNBC or Bloomberg or some other tech live on a cable channel

is probably de minimis. I mean, because then they're going to call us to say the same stuff on their channel. I mean, it is, right? It's panel shows. It is a back and forth. It's two hosts who know stuff, saying stuff. So yeah, I agree.

It's not, it's hard to depend. Yeah. All right. Let's get to my interview next up with Alex from Clue, a very fascinating startup. that you're going to really enjoy. If you're an accredited investor,

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Jason sent you. All right, everybody. AI is helping people solve all kinds of problems. And one of the problems people have is trying to figure out what they should watch next, which they should listen to next, or if they really liked a certain type of food, what restaurant they should go to next. Well, a founder I know named Alex Elias has been working on this problem for almost a decade. Then the company he has is called Clue, and you can spell it Q-L-O-O, and you can go visit it. Welcome to the program, Alex.

Thanks so much for having me, Jason. Great to see you. Yeah, good to see you. you as well. So we've known each other now, seven, eight years. I've been an advisor to the company back in the day when I was just starting out as an angel investor. You and I met. I became an advisor of the company, and you've been grinding it out. Maybe you can tell everybody what you figure it out, because when you started, you had kind of this like really interesting idea. I can remember like it was yesterday, you showing me, hey, J-Cal, put in what bands you like,

put in what restaurants you like, and then like magic. And this is long before the, you know, dialogue around machine learning and AI was very popular. it started to show me other things I might like. Basically, I think, looking at other people in my network and what they like. So maybe you could talk a little bit about the journey and what clue does. Totally, yeah. So when we first met, I think you were at the time worth a lowly eight figures. You had your Tesla parked outside.

Orange Roadster, one of the first. Number 16. Yeah. Number 16. And at the time, it was entirely a consumer premise. So we saw a world where a lot of recommendations were kind of part and parcel to large B2C services. So siloed within your Spotify, siloed within your Netflix with some understanding of your taste.

We wanted to kind of disaggregate that, disassociated, make it available to people so that they could fundamentally explore their taste in a way that's agnostic to catalog, to inventory, to service. And I remember you sitting me down when I first presented this kind of consumer premise and saying there's a ton of skeletons on the way to this prize. It's undoubtedly a massive prize, but, you know, dating back to, and it's only once I started raising funding and stuff that I saw the kind of graveyard on the way, dating back to, you know, Firefly in the 90s, which is acquired by Microsoft, one of the first kind of collaborative filtering platforms for discovering music.

But that was the- filtering, wow, there's a throwback industry term. Yeah, collaborative filtering. We all put our information in and then it kind of creates some taste graph. Right, which could be nefarious or it could be a beautiful thing, you know, depending on how it's executed. But so we started out on that journey and launched a consumer-facing app that was eponymously called Clue, scale to a few hundred thousand people, sort of got a really interesting cross-section of taste across domains. and it was only years later when we realized that that's a really difficult premise to kind of scale and hockey stick and build a revenue model around affiliate revenue and so on.

It was actually, again, with you, kind of perspicacious as ever, I was showing you some back-end admin tooling kind of around 2015 now, and I think it was something like we were able to do wacky things with the recommendations, like going across domains. Yes, I remember as distinctly because we were talking. talking about either boutique hotels or restaurants, and then you were showing me music. And I was like, wait a second, that actually kind of works. If you stayed at the proper hotel, you might, or you stayed at the standard, you actually

might like that kind of band or you might like that, you know, sushi place. Totally. And I remember there was kind of this aha moment where you called me a dumb genius, which is still one of the nicest things anyone's ever said. That sounds like, Brad. I may have said savant. Yeah. It was very kind.

It was in good spirit. But we suddenly realized there could be. something big with this whole API thing. And at the time, APIs were kind of a nascent. It wasn't really a highly scaled SaaS model. And there was always kind of this issue with educating the customer and kind of pulling developer resources to look into it. But we started firmly down that path.

And what was amazing, it was actually you and a senior product manager, Twitter at the time, who reached out for a product they were developing internally. but we just went down that path and basically started building this kind of omnibus, for lack of a better word, recommendation tooling that can take into account entities, so like a movie, a music artist, a restaurant, even just a geolocational context, and basically in real time within milliseconds kind of give recommendations for any desired output category. And so the idea was to make it in kind of a headless way that people could build

all kinds of things on top of. But frankly, it was kind of a grind, as you know, for many years. And then what really became an accelerant recently was kind of GDPR and all the privacy regs because we were never in a privileged enough position to receive PII in the first place. Like we were talking to financial services companies. Yes. So for the folks at home, PII is just personally identifiable information. Like Facebook has or Google.

has. Exactly. So anything... Or Apple could have if they wanted to use it. Exactly. Yeah. So anything that could identify you as a human being, be it an email address, a home address, a phone. Exactly. Or a combination of factors. And we've fundamentally built our capabilities without the use of PII, principally because no one wanted to share PII with us, but secondarily because we found that it's a fundamentally better model. And, you know, what's interesting. We like to say the personalization we do is kind of entity driven rather

than identity. So it's not based on who an individual is. It's just based on a set of factors. Be it, like you said, a hotel, a restaurant, a music artist, so it's entity based. And this layer of geolocation is just crazy

when you think about it. So, hey, who watched Squid Game in Brooklyn? Right. And what would they, where would they want to, what bar would they want to to or, you know, if they like this bar and they live in Brooklyn, what TV show would they like to watch tonight? I mean, this is crazy that you have this information.

Can you give us a little demo of it? Yeah, absolutely. Who are listening, will sportscast it, which means we'll describe what we see on the screen. But if you would like to watch the show, if you didn't know, we have a video feed on Spotify, a video feed on, or when you're listening to it on Spotify, you can just click the video button, or if you're on iTunes or any other podcast player, you can search for this weekend startup's video. or you can go to YouTube.com slash this week in.

So I'm going to fire up some admin tooling internally that'll show kind of the API code itself. So we aim to make it so that a single developer, if they're using Klu, could onboard and fully hook into all the magic within minutes. So we're looking at a little code snippet here. That is automatically built. You hit the drop down for recommendations for. Exactly.

So we have all these different domains. TV, podcast, people, music, Exactly. And so if we start with something like music artists, just to show how easy it is, if we search for, say, Miles Davis or John Coltrane, we'll get an entity ID. So this is John Coltrane and basically saying, who are the most recommended music artist to John Coltrane? Very simple request. You see Thelonious Monk. You see Miles Davis, Bill Evans. These kinds of requests typically take milliseconds. If we jump to another category, same idea. So if we threw in, you know, a Wes Anderson movie like Rushmore and pulled results, you're going to instantly within second see,

you know, Royal Tennon bombs, bottle rocket. But then if we start to get... Bottle Rocket also good, yeah. Yeah. And here's where it gets interesting. If you want to go across domains, this is where it clues truly unique. And all the person has to do from a programming perspective, a developer has changed the category. So say, rather than outputting films based on Rushmore, you'd say output music artists based on Rushmore. And all of a sudden, you get this kind of novel lens. You see Radiohead and back in the black keys and so on, bands that are kind of likely to be

associated with people who love Rushmore. And then to your point, if we go to a whole different category, like a geolocational category, So say we take a, something that our employees love to do is actually use this for planning dates and getting recommendations around tooling. So if you if you're traveling, for instance, and you take a restaurant, say, 11 Madison Park or your favorite restaurant in New York, you could then, and of course you see LeBernardin and John George and these kinds of places, you could actually do a cross geographical request. So using a single entity anywhere in the world, a single restaurant, you could then say... We could do Tokyo, yeah. Exactly. Tokyo, Paris, San Francisco.

So here's some Paris. Well, let me do San Francisco so that, you know, it's something you would actually recognize. Quince comes up, something. Who knows? So Cézon, A6. These are restaurants. Céson, would be the, yeah, the... Exactly.

And so that's basically the magic of it is it's this kind of totally flexible recommendation API that does the sort of thing that Netflix does for itself and Spotify does for itself, but makes that magic available to third parties and developers. We also have a, so we made an acquisition of a company coming back full circle in 2019. There's a company called Taste Dive, which was kind of doing what Klu was doing, and they had their own API, but they're fully consumer facing, fully web-based, and basically their traffic is mostly due to if you're on Google and type in movies, like anything. So if you type in movies like Rushmore, you know, taste dives almost always the number one result. You see, there's 30. I do this kind of stuff all the time. I've been on their

sites so many times. Yeah. And it's awesome. And so we actually, at the time we acquired it, it was running profitably just on Google ad places. SEO. Yeah. Affiliate links. Yeah. And we totally deprecated all advertising on it. We made this kind of pure play, basically just recommendation engine. And for us, it's been a huge portal for developers as well. So the API on Tasteive, which is much more kind of solo developers sandboxing, messing around. It's

become a big funnel, you know, coming back to Clue. So that's a little note on that. It's time for another Our Crowd deal of the week. Right now you can join Our Crowd's investment in HIL Applied Medical. According to the deal memo, they are using Nobel Prize winning technology to bring the most advanced radio therapy

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the business of, hey, for consumers, like I'll tell you some things that you might like. Right. Kind of get that everywhere. It's maybe not enough

to take out a credit card and pay for. And it's obviously, we found out not enough to get a billion users to use it. Totally. It is super valuable this data. So you start selling it. And I know Pepsi and other folks,

Universal Music Group, are using it? How are these customers using it? and then how do you make money? Yeah, so basically what we found is, as you said, an individual person who's looking for a movie, they're not going to shell out of pocket, right? But when you give this capability fundamentally to a company to understand consumer tastes essentially at an unparalleled scale, they're willing to pay a lot for it.

And really depending on the use case, if you look at, you know, you mentioned some CPG, the use cases there are kind of around branding and spokesperson selection and, you know, even deciding some distribution strategy, assortment strategy, and so on. If you take someone, if you take something that's a little more programmatic in scale, so say, you know, a large OTT, which is kind of streaming platforms, a lot of them are kind of, they have their own lens on distribution, their own inventory. They might be in a position to leverage the API to the scale of millions and millions of requests per month. And then that obviously becomes, you know, when they tie it to some value to them, it becomes something that, you know, it could be a pretty big licensing

deal. In terms of pricing, it varies very widely. And something we've learned is that it's important to be flexible with kind of our economic model. So, you know, there's certain companies, just as an example, there was a gas, a huge gas station company that was looking at essentially optimizing where they put electric chargers. And they wanted a very novel kind of geospatial lens. So we have this geospatial API, which I could also demo at some point if they're, if you're interested. But the idea is basically instead of passing a single entity through, you can pass a just

a latitude and longitude. You could pass a point and Clue will make some guesses as to the taste of that, of that particular point. So you're saying if we put in Fort Green, Brooklyn, you could tell me what those people like. Yeah, yeah. So I might as well. I know you love demos. So let me, uh, yeah, let's do it. All right. So I'm going to switch now to the geospatial end point. Show me what hipsters think. We'll do Venice and then we'll do Fort Green. Yeah, let's do, uh, I'll one up you. I'll do

Upper East Side versus the Bronx, something even closer together. Okay, we'll be down Bronx. Sure. So if we take a geospatial, all from, if you're developer at home, you just switch to slash Geospatial. Just describe what you're seeing on here. You could actually see the API calls. You see the code base. And it's got like a little whizzy wig drop-down editor. So here we're picking a couple categories.

Yep. And even within brands, for instance, we've classified over 150 sub-genres. So you could literally drill down into fashion. But even within that, you could get into, you know, leather goods. Oh, fashion is super interesting. Yeah. So yeah, if we jump. Let's do that.

So let's take fashion and then basically take a single point. So this is showing. Going a map. Going through a map. We got New York, we got Manhattan. And here we go. So I'm going to literally drop a pen. Oh, my Lord, we're dropping a pin.

I'm getting way close to Central Park here. In Barney's Land. This is Barney's. Oh, way, we're on that. We're on the, uh, we're on the, 759th Street and Fifth Avenue. Here we go. So you're going to, you're going to instantly within milliseconds, just using a latitude and longitude, no PI, no PII, no other contexts.

We get these fashion brands, right? So you see the row, you see J. Crew, you see Chanel, uh, things that are likely, likely to be relevant. And then we have this nifty thing that we use internally where we could compare results. So I'm going to clone this request. And then I'm just...

Side by side, the two data sets. Exactly. And we'll pick the Bronx. And now we can see if Jay Cruz... Yeah, let's see if Jay Cruz still survives this query. So now you're going to see a whole different set of results. Including...

Including a bathing ape, supreme, uh, Kith. A little more urban, if you will. a little more young, a little more flavor, yeah, love it.

And so, and that's the basic idea. So this could be used globally. In fact, one of our biggest customers for that is a billboard company, believe it or not. The largest billboard company in the world,

J.C. They have 1.5 million media assets. And now they know who to go after. They can say, hey, listen, Supreme, you need, if you're looking to service your existing customers,

here are people where you're reigning supreme so you can, so to speak, you can double down. Or here's places where you don't rank. Maybe you could get a message to these hoity tooty people on the Upper Side. And maybe there's some way to bring them in. And then you could test if your sales go up there. Totally. Totally. Yeah.

And they've had some really novel kind of ROI from this. So, you know, a luxury automaker in Belgium, for instance, was looking at. you know, kind of the well-trodden paths there. And it turned out there was very high affinities in areas that were not traditionally upscale at all. And it turns out they're kind of, you know, it's a startup hub that's, there's a lot of kind of young, young money there. And so, yeah, crypto money or maybe money from, I don't know, music, professional sports, whatever. Right. So, you know, young plus money is rare, right? Because you should get your money when you're older. So young money to find that young money that would want a Bugatti or whatever crazy car.

The next generation of customers. And so those are kind of placements that they never otherwise would have sold. So genius. Yeah. And so there's. You could also figure out, like if you were Supreme and you were popular there, you could figure out who to do what these kids call the co-lab. I don't know if you know this.

It's when you have two laboratories and you put them together. I know it all too well. Collaboration. Yeah. No, but I mean, you could do like Supreme's like, okay, wait, Supreme. And then what's the best rest of? restaurant musician. Now you want to do like on Issa Rae Show Insecure.

She does the block. I don't know if you watch Insecure, but you know, she does her own like kind of music arts festival, culture festival. And it's like, cool. You could kind of drop a culture festival in that pin that we did in the Bronx and you would know what to put in the culture festival, what music, who should play, what brands of clothing should be there do a fashion show. And maybe what food should be served.

Right? And what restaurant should serve? I love that idea. And it's funny, we actually have one of the most recent kind of big evangelists and utilizers of our API as a QSR restaurant group that has thousands of restaurants. I don't want to mention the name. Quick serve restaurant. And they actually have been leveraging it to decide what music to play at every location. Oh, I was about to say the playlist, right?

Yeah. So now you go in to get your subway sandwich. I wouldn't say which one. But whatever, you go in to get a hoagie or a pizza or whatever. Right. And they're playing your song, the song that appeals to those people. Exactly. And it's a cool use case.

It's imbueing the world with a little more variety in the soundscape. But it just shows there's kind of, you know, we've really benefited from not being too dogmatic about what the use cases are. And I think, you know, sometimes it makes the sales cycle harder because we don't know who the buyer is. We don't know what the exact use case is. but in the long run it's led to some really interesting deals that are kind of particularized to you know what what companies

need. You should make like another one of these landing page sites where you just have here's music that people like so you know people you know music like Bob Dylan music like whatever. I would love if you want to if you want to build that we'll supply you with the API for your charge. Anybody who wants to do

this go to QLOO.com reach out to Alex at Clue and maybe clue.com Alex.clu.com and just see if maybe you want to make a landing page site, you can do something creative and then all of a sudden see if you get the SEO for it because consumers would love to know fashion, you know, adjacent

fashion brands and music brands. Totally. Totally. I do kind of cool stuff here. Totally. Yeah. And we love empowering those kinds of far out use cases as well. Kind of like this is the next level of APIs for places like Amazon Web Services or Google. Like they kind of get your storage, you know.

They get you your, you know, CPU and compute and then eventually email and SendGrid and Twilio. But if you think about like the layer and the stack, business intelligence, AI, this kind of stuff is really the new frontier. Totally. Now that you've got your storage lined up, you kind of got to do something with what you stored, you know? Totally. Totally. Yeah. And they've been, you know, it's a really exciting kind of adjacency and we plug in really well. A lot of our customers obviously use AWS and use compute cycles kind of layered on top. These people haven't bought you yet.

I don't think they would be banging the door down. We'll never, never say never. You never know. Who knows? Maybe somebody is listening. Always open to fireside chats, but we've been pretty heads down operating and show no signs. Based on Manhattan still.

Soho somewhere. Yeah, base of Manhattan. We have an Amsterdam presence through the, through the taste dive acquisition. But as you can tell, there's cast iron buildings behind me. So we're on Crosby Street. Hiring right now? And they get a couple job openings? Absolutely.

Yep. Absolutely. sales, data science, API, devs, infrastructure folks, DevOps, the whole deal. Yeah, we're actively hiring. Go to clue.com slash careers.

QLOO dot com slash careers. Well, listen, Alex, continued success. Thank you so much, Jason. Great to be on the cap table. And I just love the fact that you didn't give up and you kept grinding it out. And that when I told you stopped being stupid and go after this enterprise money,

you took it. Yeah. It was obvious to you. Usually it's that triangulation. You know, you kind of, you try the consumer stuff. You see if it works. And if it doesn't, boom, now you've got this other opportunity. Yeah, it's recognizing there might still be value.

And we greatly appreciate everything you've helped us with and the support. And you're definitely a font of wisdom. So much appreciated. You know what? You talk to all these smart founders. And then I get to triangulate in my database. And I'm like, consumer company, not getting traction. hitting a ceiling,

Beep, beep, boop. Try enterprise and build an API. Build a SaaS product. You should. If there were a JSON API, I think it would, at the very least, it would lead a lot of great companies. Yeah.

It's a pretty classic, if I'm being honest, it's a pretty classic trope in our industry, which is like, you know, yeah, you give it the shot. And if consumers embrace it great, but, you know, consumers are fickle. Sometimes it's timing. Sometimes they're not ready for it. You know, a lot of people tried short video years ago.

it never worked, now short video works. You know, people tried photo sharing, it didn't work. Flickr was like this like a little obscure thing and then Instagram became giant. You know, the world's fickle and, you know, timing matters. And then I think this enterprise stuff keeps the lights on and it may make a little money printing machine. Totally.

And you've always said, actually, that consumer companies are like mining for gold and enterprise companies are like farming, you know? Yeah. It's a great analogy, you know. It's like, you know, when you plant a bunch of seeds in a really fertile ground, it's like, yeah, something's going to come out. And then it's like, yeah,

there's a diamond somewhere in there. Right. Somewhere on planet Earth, you'll find a diamond. Yep. theoretically. It might take you 10 lifetimes. All right, brother, continued success. Everybody will check out clue, Q-L-O-O-O-com slash careers. And go give me, if you're a developer, go check it out.

Let me come up some creative ideas and tweet and not mention us. All right, everybody. Next up on the program is Rachel reporting. It's time for Rachel reporting's OK Boomer segment. So today on OK Boomer, I got to talk to Zara Nockby from Republic. She is an investment associate there and recent grad. I mean, basically just talked about how she was able to make herself helpful as a young person in the VC space and how she was able to break into that role directly after college. Fantastic.

So this is somebody not starting a fund, not starting a company, but going to work inside a high growth company. And you kind of talk about how to get yourself into those high growth companies. Exactly. Exactly. And Excel inside of it. Yes, exactly. I feel like we talked to a lot of people that were really awesome starters. Again, like you said, like started their own funds, started their own companies.

But I didn't really get to sit down and chat with anybody in these high growth places like Zara. What's cool, too, about this interview is that it seems like Zara is understanding the assignment when it comes to creating a brand and creating value in this space that's beyond just the actual work she's doing, right? She created this thing called the Z list, which is so clever because it's like Xero with a Z. Tell us about the Z list. So the Z list is actually how she shares deal flow. It's a curated list of companies that fits into her investors in our ecosystems' thesis. I thought that was really interesting. I actually thought it was called the Z list because of Gen Z, but it's because of her name. So I think that's pretty clever. It works on every level.

Right, right? I think it's so sick. the whole process probably takes around like one hour a week she said and the list is extremely curated and I think you always see like those memes like how can I be helpful but she's actually doing it so wow that is so sick that she understood the assignment and we stand you Molly you don't think I was gonna catch you dropping we're learning we're learning you drop I understood the assignment I saw you do it I knew well later I'll tell you a story about how Rachel talked to me in Genzi language and I straight up did not I boomered it I was like, I don't know. Oh, my God, no, really?

She said somebody was really sick and was really sick. And I was like, is he okay? Oh, no, Molly. Yep, that happened. I own it. I own it. Yeah. They're healthy.

Don't worry. It's very cool. So here we go. Another amazing, okay boomer segment for all of you on a Friday. Awesome. Thank you guys for having. Good job. Oh, there's the motorcycle going on.

I know, totally. Right at the end. Rachel in the city. We're going to have to start another segment of Rachel. Rachel in the city. Rachel in the city. It's so loud. Okay, Boomer.

I understood the assignment. Thank you so much, Sarah, for joining us for today's show. Zara, Nakvi is an investment associate at Republic. But Zara, can you fill us in on what Republic is and what they do? Yeah, so Republic is a reg CF platform. Essentially, we're democratizing access to investing for basically anyone and everyone. initially, like years ago, only accredited investors could invest in like private companies and startups and Republic and Reg CF that is basically the law or like the legal thing that made the

SEC able to allow anyone to invest is what our platform kind of specializes in. It's our bread and butter. And so you can go on to Republic and invest in a handful of startups. And we're just democratizing access to that since it's definitely been kind of kept away from people for many, many years. That's awesome. So just a disclaimer, I didn't have you on because Republic is a sponsor of the show. I just thought you were incredibly well spoken. And I wanted to learn more about what it meant to be an investment associate at Republic. Kind of just hear what you do day to day and things like that. I hear a lot about Gen Zs in particular, trying to break into the world of VC. But sometimes it's a little iffy on what that actually entails. So what does it mean to be an investment

associate at Republic. Yeah, for sure. So at Republic, being an investment associate essentially means that I'm kind of comparable to like a VC analyst in the sense that I am talking to founders. Basically every day, I talk to at least like anywhere from, I think, 40 in one week to like the highest I did in one week was 91 founders. And so it's definitely just a wide range of getting in front of people, learning about their product. And I think as you go, being an investment associate at Republic, we're industry agnostic stage agnostic. So I'm talking to like a B2B SaaS company. Then half an hour later, I'm talking to like a CPG company with like a actual tangible product. And so I think you kind of learn, especially as a young person, what types of questions to ask like what

types of companies. And so for me, when I joined Republic, it was such a incredible learning experience because it's like taking the combination of what you do in a VC, except I actually am not focusing on one specific industry or stage, I get to focus on, like, as many as I want and just talk to as many founders as I want. And then I work at like a high growth tech startup. So there's always like different projects to get involved in, like different ways that I can work on Republic's, like, I guess like our different products, what we're building, things that are coming out, announcements, events. So that is really what it means to be an investment associate at Republic. I feel like there's just so much opportunity to learn so many things. And I wanted to snatch up

that opportunity as soon as I could, especially as like the first thing that I'm doing out of college. That is incredible that this is your first like big good job out of college. It seems like an awesome opportunity for the marrying of both like wanting to work in tech and wanting to work in VC, which are both kind of difficult industries to navigate the process of like getting hired and everything like that. Take me back, I guess, before you were an investment associate, what did your path into becoming a associate republic look like? What were you doing before this? Yeah.

So, I mean, to take it like really far back when I was younger, just for context, like, I grew up in Hong Kong and Singapore. And I was kind of like coming into like my teens and like middle school during like, I think the creator economy actually becoming an economy. There were all of these YouTubers and so many products that they were kind of like first pushing out. And it was like the first boom of the creator economy. So little me in like Hong Kong, I was like 12 or 13.

My sister and I just started a business. Definitely not a venture backable business, but something that was of substance. We made it profitable. It was an e-commerce business in like 2014-ish. And that I think was like my first foray into startups in VC because I had to learn what it meant to like take a business from scratch to like bootstrap it and get it off the ground. And so that is kind of what I started with. Came to Columbia. Definitely was under the impression that I had to.

to go down like a certain path if I wanted to like work in startups or if I wanted to work in VC. And I studied financial economics. I was like very much going to go down the path of like the traditional banking or consulting experience. I worked at Deloitte. It was definitely an awesome opportunity. I learned a lot from it. But that was also during like the 2020 summer of COVID, like the first summer of COVID that we had, realized that it wasn't necessarily the direction I wanted to go in and I found Republic. So I think Republic at this point was like pre-series A company. It definitely was in its like kind of infancy. And so I remember just like reaching out and emailing everyone just saying like, hey, this is what I do. This is like my experience working in startups at

Columbia or like being president of the women's business society and just like pitching myself to see if there was going to be an opportunity for me to work there. And so I circulated my resume put myself out there in terms of saying like this is what I've accomplished at my time at Columbia or like the startups I've been part of or the teams I've worked worked for a part of me and just like wanted to say like hey this is what I can provide and this is what I think I can do and that turned out to be like the best decision I ever made because when I was about to graduate like I'd say like this time last year I was seriously considering going back to like a traditional bigger company but then I also had this opportunity at Republic.

And so I think being like a founder and having that like kind of creative mentality from like a decade ago to the position I'm in now, like I want to talk to founders. I sympathize with what they're going through, especially at like the earlier stage because I had to go through that process. And so I think like I definitely see myself as like a founder first, which is why I love working for startups and getting to know the founders that I speak to and asking them like, like beyond Republic like how else can I help you? Are there like introductions I can facilitate? Are there questions that you have? Like do you want to talk about your cap table? Like anything that I can do to help

a founder, I feel like that's the position that I'm in right now. So I just try to make myself like available. And I think like working on all of these different startups from like pre-seed fintech companies to like series A cat food companies. Like I have had a really wide array of like startup experience. I think all of that just added to like the. desire to just want to help founders because it really is like the hardest job out there, just being a founder and building something. Yeah, no, I definitely agree with you. It's really difficult to go off on your own and say, you know what, this is something that

I feel I'm good enough at to start my own company. I feel like that's a really scary leap of faith. And obviously it's a really scary leap of faith as well for someone just graduating college to go from a traditional work setting like at Deloitte to a startup world. So kudos to you on making multiple leaps of faith, like way early in your career. I think that's very difficult. And you kind of mentioned how you're always making yourself available. And I know the phrase, like, how can I be helpful, has turned into kind of a joke on the internet at this point.

But you've actually gone significantly out of your way to be an extremely helpful investor. Can you talk a little bit about the Z-list and how it has made you a helpful young person in venture? You were very humble and didn't even mention it yet. So if you could explain a little bit what the Z-list is and how you're absolutely rocking it with that. Yeah, for sure. So just kind of like taking it back, I think, while I've been at Republic, and even before that, when I was a student, I would see startups on like Slack groups or on LinkedIn. And I'd reach out to the founder and be like, hey, I want to help you out. Like, is there something that I can do that takes like two weeks or like, is there some industry you need research that I can help out with? And a huge part of it was like, yes, I wanted to say I had all of this experience just so I could kind of test everything, see what I enjoyed, see the type of work that resonated with. me and then actually like nail something down. So while I've been at Republic, yes, it's like, I'm talking to so many founders a week and I want to make sure I like remember all of them, although sometimes it's really hard. But I started just thinking, okay, like beyond what I was

actually doing and like my full time job, are there other things that I can do while being in VC to just be hopeful to these founders? So I started thinking about creating something called the Z list. So of course, like, I think the bread and butter for any VC is having deal flow. And I don't think I actually knew that when I was trying to break into VC, quote, unquote, or like trying to break into a startup or become an operator at a startup or be a founder or anything along those lines. For a VC, receiving high quality deal flow also, it in a way kind of makes the process of finding a company that they could invest in like a lot easier. Because instead of having to spend like hours sourcing, just imagine if they had people who like, worked in a certain industry or someone like myself who talks to like precede to later stage

companies completely industry agnostic. I might just talk to a B2B SaaS company, but there's like so many VCs who actually specialize in the space who would want to actually talk to this founder for more than half an hour, ask them more questions and potentially invest. So I realized, hey, like, why don't I actually take these introductions I get to founders and turn it into something that can actually like be like a network to introduce VCs and founders to new opportunities. So I love Twitter because I really just kind of brought this around through Twitter in terms of it actually scaling and becoming big. Before that, it was more like the VCs that I knew or the VCs that I spoke to while I was in school. I just said like, can you remind me again of like what you look for specifically,

like founder qualities or industry or stage? And then I literally just started sending them like Gmail, just like really regular emails that had like six decks in them, the links to the founders and said, hey, here are the decks. Any want to like get in touch with? Just let me know. I would email the founder if there was a VC that was interested. And then I'd make that intro.

And I've done so many now. And it's really, really rewarding because I think it shows that like the pain point in this industry is warm introductions because founders get frustrated when they don't hear back from VCs and they want to focus on building. but then a huge part of fundraising is actually like getting in front of a VC. So that's kind of how the Z-list came about. People were like, oh, is it called the Gen Z-List? And I'm like, no, I wish.

It's really kind of more self-centered than that. It is short for Zara's list. Yeah, exactly. I love that. I love that. But it's, yeah, it's been incredible. And I, right now people are like, what's your CRM and like, how are you doing this? And I'm literally like I just have stuff saved on my desktop in different industries,

different stages. And they're all just kind of like, yeah, sitting there. And so right now it's not like, I feel like this is also just to say that like when you're doing this, it doesn't have to be some like huge thought out process where you have like a CRM where you have some like really ornate way of managing these like introductions you have to founders. It can literally be very simple. You can use Gmail all free software like literally your hardware, just save the decks and send them out. And like I think it's something a lot of people can do. And so I think the Z-list is like honestly the best.

thing that I've done for myself because I'm meeting more VCs through this. And I'm actually being helpful to founders more than just saying like, oh, how can I help you? I actually have something to offer now. That's so awesome. I can't believe if you just save them on your desktop, that's so, I would get so disorganized. I had like a notion page that I had to use. And I was like religious about it. But I think you're right. At the end of the day, just keeping things simple and making it as quick as possible and getting it out there is much more helpful than being nitpicky on the actual organizational aspect of it and then not having as many connections come out of it. What has been the most rewarding connection that you've made from that list?

Yeah. So I think honestly, off the top of the kind of first time I think I did the Z list or maybe like the first 10 that I sent out, I made an introduction to Sarah, who is the founder of Cleo Cap. And I sent her, I think, about like six or seven companies and she was interested in one of them. I don't want to go into too much detail about what the company was, but that introduction was so fulfilling because I had actually witnessed Sarah doing Cleo clap, I think for like two to three years prior to that. Like I remember seeing it on Slack groups when it was first like coming about

and she was like posting content about it and reading about it. So it was really, I think, fulfilling for me to see that. I had taken like her advice of just like reading her website, looking at portfolio and then really tailoring like a list of companies that actually fit what I think was similar to what I saw in her portfolio or companies that were at a similar stage of growth as the ones that were in her portfolio. So I think that was like the fourth or fifth introduction I made. It was really, really early, definitely in the first 10 or something. And that was super rewarding because I, yeah, I remember looking at Sarah like two years ago when she was

starting Cleo Cap and it was definitely like a completely just like surreal thing for me to be able to realize that yes, this actually makes sense. Like there are VCs that you've been witnessing and admiring who you can now actually make introductions to. Whether it goes somewhere or it doesn't, I feel like it's still is just a really rewarding thing as like a young person breaking into this industry to know that you've helped a founder and you've helped a VC because the conversations, I think, even if they don't work out, I know so many VCs who like circle back or they actually go and make like their own warm introductions if they know another VC that makes sense. So that was really rewarding for me. That is so cool. It's like the same.

of Kevin Bacon, but it's the six degrees of like the Z list coming out of it. I definitely see how that can be rewarding on both sides. And I kind of want to shift the conversation to another thing that I see tweet a lot about. And that is shifting the investing landscape. What does it mean to want to shift the investing landscape? And again, what does that look like? Yeah. So I think like at the core of everything, when I started like my first business, I feel like the people who would of readily invested in it immediately would have been other like 13 to like or tween teenage girls who were living in like Southeast Asia at that time. And it just kind of now like looking back 10 years later, I realized like yeah, that would have been a great way to scale the company

because I would have been giving the opportunity to the people who want to see these products to invest in the business. And so I think a huge reason why I resonate with like Republic's mission and just all the different ways of financing and investing and democratizing access. that we see nowadays. The reason I resonate with it so much is because I believe fundamentally that there are founders, there are companies, there are projects, whatever it may be that deserve to get funding. But just because the VC landscape has been run by the same people for so long, there are companies that are not getting the fundraising that they need. I definitely think the tides are changing, like even with people like Lolita Taub or like Mac Conwell, like there's a lot

of exciting change within the traditional VC landscape. But I think there's something. something to say about giving your consumer, your client, your user, whatever it may be, the opportunity to invest in what you're creating because ultimately they're the people who are going to stick around. They're the people who are going to drive traction. They are the people who are going to be loyal to you if like a competitor comes up. And so it almost makes like too much sense to like give them the opportunity to have a stake in the company. And so for me like, changing the landscape of investing is always or like fundamentally about access. And so from the Gen Z perspective, again, like, I have a whole theory about like the creator economy and like just Gen Z investing and how ownership is really at the core of everything that Gen Z currently cares about.

And ownership can be interpreted as like, yes, investing in public companies, investing in private companies through apps like Republic, Dow's, NFTs, like everything that we're really seeing that is being kind of linked to Gen Z at its core is about ownership and feeling like you're part of a community. or like you're able to kind of make a change or communicate your thoughts. And so I think that for the landscape of investing, that's the way that I think about it in the sense that Gen Z definitely brought about the whole ownership economy or the creator economy because there were like millennial YouTubers and millennial Instagrammers. But the people who were like actually giving them the clout and creating those communities were people who were Gen Z.

We were like the first 11, 12 year olds following people on like YouTube and Instagram and all of And so it started with like just the content itself from the creators and like the community with the community came the clout. After the clout came the capital. And then after that comes change. And I think we're at that point now where we're in the cycle of Gen Z's starting kind of like this ownership economy and now actually bringing it into fruition and people hearing our voices. Like there are so many people who are making a difference with that like Gabby Goldberg and Megan Loist and showcasing like what it means to be a Gen Z. investor. But yeah, I believe everything at its core comes down to ownership. And so being able to invest in a startup, I think is entirely kind of like coexistent with what Gen Z desires and the

products we look after and the communities that we desire to be part of. I think all of it comes back to that at its core. You mentioned like a level there of change in that whole cycle of things. What does change, what do you think change could be coming out of this? Yeah, I think that like obviously change is such a huge word. And I feel like, we're in the stage now. We're like, okay, one, we're shifting from web two to web three. That's change. But even beyond that, like, diverse founders getting funding for what they're building is part of that change. But also, like, VCs being represented by people who look like them, that's part of the change too. And obviously, this is all very specific to like our industry,

like startups tech VC. But I think like truly, this is taking it kind of back and in a different direction. But like, I am Pakistani and like a huge part of my core belief. is that in order for the country to kind of progress and to continue to grow, fundraising needs to go into the startups that are coming out of there. And in the last year, we are seeing a lot of attention on Pakistani startups as like an emerging market to pay attention to. And I honestly think a huge part of that is from like the younger millennials and

Gen Zs who are leading the change of getting like the traditional like American VC investors to be excited about the opportunity in the country. That's change. So I think like the way that I think about it, one, the company that I'm at right now is bringing about change because like a decade ago only accredited investors could invest in startups. We are bringing about change and like ownership of a company or ownership of a community through like Dow's and through just access through reg CF investing and even just like angel list. There are a lot of Gen Zs now who are able to like take the series 65

test or do different things to get accredited and to invest in these different off like opportunities and offerings. So kind of collectively, I I feel like change is something where we are really just shifting the status quo. We are giving like creators the opportunity to actually like monetize their their communities and their followers in a way that goes beyond just like the traditional like selling them a product and they get like an affiliate link. Like this way they actually, with the creator economy companies we're seeing, they're actually going to be able to like communicate with their community and say like,

hey, like what do you actually want to see me do? Like how can I create content that you want to see? I think it's all about like access and change. And I think the democratizing of everything across the board is what it's going to yield that. And so I mean, I think pretty like holistically, that's the way that I think about it. But change is such a huge word. So again, there could be so many things where everything I just said could also change like in the next two years.

So there's definitely a lot that like I don't know, but that's just like the way that I think about it. Oh, I think that was, I think that summed it up really well. I think you're right that change is like a giant word. And I also think that's just so different to everybody, especially in this space where it's seems like our generation in particular every time I have a conversation with another person in this sphere of things, whether that be a Gen Z founder or a Gen Z investor. I've noticed that instead of like keeping blinders on, they tend to have very broad goals. So I hope that change like necessarily one startup, like their main goal might not be impacting another area. But with like

you said, especially like the development of like ownership and things like that, I think a lot of companies and investors that have a focus on one thing are actually changing so many others long the way now more than ever. Like you said, like with American investors kind of broadening up those borders of where they're willing to invest, having for them, it's like, oh, more companies to invest to. And then for somebody in a different country, that might be a life-changing opportunity. And that might not be why the person is necessarily investing to change like another economy's life cycle or to really impact that founder in particular. They might just be like, that's a good idea. But again, like, change comes about in so many different ways. It's now broader

more than ever. And I think you were incredibly well-spoken on that. Thank you so much for being on. I think that was an incredible little segment of the show. And you were just so well-spoken. And I'm really, really happy that our world's got to collide. Where can everybody find you if they want to connect with you? Yeah. So you can follow me on Twitter. I'm Zara Nukfi with an underscore on Twitter. And my name is just kind of spelled like. how it sounds. And then beyond that, you can find applications to apply to Republic at Join Republic on Twitter. There's a link there and everything.

I highly encourage founders to apply. And you could potentially get connected to me and I could be helpful to you and get you to be part of the Z list at some point if there are founders listening. So let me know how I can be helpful. I was kidding. Thank you again so much for being on. And thank you everybody for listening. Hey, guys, Rachel, reporting here on February 14th and 15th,

We'll be hosting Founder University intensive. This is a two-day program for Founders. Now, this course is only open to women founders. We'll be hosting a course open to everyone on May 9th and 10th. You can apply for both at founder. Dot University. And applications for the longer 12-week Founder University program are due on February 14th, and you can also apply for those at founder.

com. Follow Jason and Molly on Twitter. At Jason and at Molly Wood. If you're not a boomer and prefer TikTok, Search for this week in startups to find the fan account at this underscore week underscore in underscore startups. And our official account at TWA startups, but honestly the fan account is way better than ours. And if you're still not tired of hearing from Jason six days a week, you can hear of read his book angel at angelthebook.com slash audible.