This Week in Startups - Reaction to Adam Neumann's $350M raise, Boom Supersonic's new deal + The Blueprint Part 6 | E1537

Episode Date: August 18, 2022

J+M kick off the show by discussing the reaction to Adam Neumann's $350M raise (1:40), before covering Boom Supersonic's new deal with American Airlines (24:59), and a Startup of the Day. (41:55) Jason wraps the show solo for part 6 of The Blueprint, where he covers getting ahead of trends! (48:06) (0:00) J+M intro today's segments! (1:40) Thoughts on the reaction to Adam Neumann's $350M raise from a16z, including a NY Post article that Jason was quoted in (12:45) WorkOS - Go to https://workos.com to learn how to make your app enterprise-ready. (14:14) Was the negative reaction to the fundraising warranted? What is the counter case? (24:04) Visa - Learn more about Visa’s online Small Business Hub at Visa.com/smallbusinesshub (24:59) American Airlines agrees to purchase up to 20 jets from airplane startup Boom Supersonic, J+M do some math on ticket prices (34:13) Brave - Download today at https://brave.com/twist to browse faster, search privately and so much more (35:33) Does the world need supersonic passenger jets? (41:55) Startup of the Day: Goodfellows helps elderly people and young people foster connections (48:06) The Blueprint Part 6: Jason explains how he gets ahead of trends Jason's Howard Stern/Spotify blog from 2015: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/howard-sterns-easy-billion-dollar-pay-day-courtesy-app-calacanis

Hey, everybody. Happy Wednesday. Big show today. First, we're going to react to the reactions to Adam Newman's funding news. Lots of reactions. Meta reactions. It's just infinity content. I'm sorry. Adam Newman is infinity content. Then, though, we're going to have a little startup talk, like a little like real or not real. We're talking about Boom Supersonics deal with American Airlines to sell a bunch of really fast airplanes. And then we're going to talk about Goodfellows, an amazing, an amazing. heartwarming, new startup that's been funded in India. I'll give you the backstory there.

Very sweet. And then, of course, we're going to wrap with Jason and his next edition of The Blueprint. It's going to be a great show. It's got to be a great show. Stick with us. This week in Startups is brought to you by WorkOS is a developer platform to make your app enterprise ready. With a few simple APIs, you can immediately add common enterprise features like single sign-on, multi-factor authentication and more.

Go to workOS.com to learn how to make your app enterprise ready. Visa. Are you a small business owner? Did you know that Visa's online small business hub has tools, discounts, and resources to help you run your business? Learn more at visa.com slash small business hub. And Brave is an internet privacy company on a mission to protect your personal info online. Download Brave today at brave.com slash twist to browse faster, search privately, and so much more.

All in a single click. Hey everybody. It's Wednesday. You made it. We're at the top of the mountain. You're listening to this. It's all downhill, right, Molly? It is. It's going to be great. It's almost the weekend. It's summer here in the Bay Area. I know some of you are starting to have your pumpkin spice lattes and your big sweaters. We are in full summer attire. in the Bay Area because summer starts August 15th. Well, with global warming, you know, it's like we all get to live

in Mexico City. Anybody... It's very temperate. Incredible. I feel like L.A. is turning into Mexico in terms of temperature and climate. Yeah. San Francisco's turning into L.A.

Like, we're having these, like, heat waves that felt like when I lived in, you know, Santa Monica, Brentwood. Yeah. And I think that means Mexico turns into the third circle of hell or something, like Berger-D? Like, how hot is it going to get? Did you see the Austin temperatures?

No. Like, you know, Texas and Mexico is the same thing, right? It's like the same. Yeah, it's pretty hot in Austin. Best case. Over 100 degrees. If you were to look at the monthly chart of Austin, a lot of my friends who moved to Austin were like, how come nobody told me about this?

I was like, they warned you like 20 times. You did not listen. That's what I'm talking about. August in Austin or just Texas. Austin is H.E. Double two-Degrees every day. It's horrific. All right, let's do it. We got a good show today.

These topics have been so rich. And you and I have too much fun. Way too much fun. Way too much fun. So Monday. Love this job. Monday we talked about work from home for an hour. Tuesday, that was just yesterday.

Monday was that yesterday? And Monday was Adam Newman. Monday was the full-on Adam Newman news. Yesterday we just batting around work from home for an hour. It's literally. This is too much job. It's work. And then.

If the funnier this gets, like the more people show up for the live stream, which has been great, YouTube.com slash this weekend. Like, we're just getting 300 people live. It's pretty hilarious. And we, some of the jokes are only for the live audience. So this, if you're hearing this, you're hearing the podcast. But there's another half hour of shenanigans that you don't hear on the show. That only is for the noities in the live audience. YouTube.com slash this weekend. Okay. But we have to store it. We have such a full docket of news. We really do. That just keeps overflowing into the next day. But we have to do a roundup of the reactions. to the reactions to A-16 giving Adam Newman $350 million before he launches his company. I mean, we're all familiar with the thing that happens on Twitter where there's an event and then a backlash to the event and then a backlash all the way back around the aruburose cycle where pretty soon the worm is just eating its own tail. And that is sort of what happened. Like the somewhat obvious, we had a lot of fun with this.

obviously. I think we also mentioned the fact that, like, yes, of course, it is patently unfair that this guy who committed all this to canary then just lands a $350 million check when like all kinds of founders are out here struggling to even get a meeting. Yeah. So that that was sort of the expected and immediate response, right? Like, as exemplified by this New York Post story, which was, you know, investors. Yeah, I got re aggregated. So this is something that happens to like Bill Sings. and some other folks. Like you talk about something on your pod and then people reaggregate it. So they actually, the journalist reached out to me

because I guess he had heard my rule, you know, Jason's rule. If a company becomes worth a billion dollars before launches products, it's probably a fraud. I don't think that actually applies here because it were probably as in Jason's rule, but I basically, I was like,

oh my God, you know, the New York Post. I haven't been in the New York Post in a long time. So I was like, what's the best quote I could give to the post and let me try to give them two or three of those? Because I know, As a former journalist, I know quote bait.

You've heard of link bait? There's a level below which is quote bait. And, you know, it's like a.k.a. sound bites. But read a couple of my quotes in here because I was just baiting this journalist. I was like, I'm just going to give this journalist like the Alleyu pass for the clear dunk. Yeah. And they took it. Not surprisingly. After the story was published online, Callicannis responded to an email from the post and said that he had faith in Newman. Quote, if Adam opened a hot dog stand in Staten Island, I would invest, Calacanis said.

I actually think he has an 80% chance of making this work since this is his revenge startup. Okay. Now let's break down my quote. I mean, it is how you make quote bait. Number one, there's got to be collateral damage. So Staten Island's a collateral damage, right? Yep. So it's like, who, what's great collateral damage for people who have to read the New York Post?

Well, there's people on the Staten Island ferry. There's people coming from Brooklyn and Queens, whatever. They're going into work. They pick up the post like I used to. And, you know, you're just zipping through it. So I had to take like a little collateral damage for Staten Island. And then like, you know, hot dog stand is classic New York, right? Hot Dog Stand in Staten Island is like the worst business I could think of it to have.

Like, can you imagine you get that job? That's the worst job you can have is a hot dog stand working on a hot dog stand. It's social. It kind of. Listen, it's not a dig to anybody, but it's not the best business in the world. Anyway, but then I gave them a term. a term of art. Like terms of art, this is just another one.

When you can make up a term of art, like revenge startup, you know, like kind of, that's how memes work with words. So if you can brand branding works that way. Bless you. That was the most mansplaining particular sentence ever. That's how means. Well, I was doing it for the audience. But yeah.

Like, you know how words work when you put them together. If you put some words together. To make a new term. Yes. But you had one yesterday, like the quiet quitting. Yeah. Was it quiet pretty? I wish I made that up, but I did not make that.

So there's me and Molly. There's me and Molly. You see I'm working out and you see Molly has grown. That's actually, that's actually true. I'm 5'9. I'm like 5'8 and a half, but I say 5'9. Sometimes I round up. I'll start rounding down.

And I say 6 feet. And you're like 6 foot. So this is me talking to Molly. How about how words work? How words work. Anyway, for people who are not watching the video, it's just a picture of a meme of a jacked guy who's bald and three feet shorter than a woman who looks like Heather Graham in a crop top with her hair blown out.

Oh, God. And so if Molly got extensions. How words work. We should, can somebody just take that picture and put this week in startups? We'll make it the album mark. The album art? We should totally make it the album art for your one-year anniversary. I mean, I think we pretty much have to.

Anyway, so that was my joke about it. And there's the New York Post. But yes, revenge startup. is super evocative and everyone is going to start using it. No doubt about it. That's how you do. No doubt about it. And then having a rule, heuristic is also bait.

So people with heuristics rules yada yada. See, Molly, a heuristic is a rule. You are I. You why Molly's vocabulary. We have to do a vocabulary test. I guarantee you Molly's vocabulary is 30% higher than mine. Easily. easily.

However, as you may have heard on yesterday's show, I cannot do basic factors of 10 math. So I do get you on the back of the event. Let's go through some of the other reactions. There were lots of reactions to the reactions, of course. And so then you start to see. So the headline of that post story was Investor Slam, we work founders, quote, disgusting come back. And then you start to see, not surprisingly, the boomerang.

people start to defend the Newman deal, including somewhat surprisingly Sarah Lacey, who was, you know, a long time, a big name tech journalist back when you and I were doing this, but is now doing other things, but said, I don't really get the confusion. I think she's got a mom startup, like a women's group mom startup. Yep, exactly. She did Pando Daily, and then now she's on this chairman me, which is like a mom startup thing. A friend of mine actually went to one of her retreats and really enjoyed it. I heard it's great. Yeah. I mean, the people need those mastermind kind of things. Yeah. Yeah, it's great. Anyway, but she wrote back and said, I don't get the confusion, or she wrote back, she tweeted a long thread saying, I don't get the confusion over the Mark Andreessen Adam Newman deal. She said this is totally in keeping with how Mark has always invested and how Silicon Valley does. Housing, she writes, is a huge problem. Newman has a track record of raising gargantuan funds and going after huge real estate issues. Mark likes funding huge bold ideas. And she also points out there are scores of people who blew up and later built or delivered the biggest scores in Valley history, the invest.

who won are the ones who gave them a second chance, like, say, Sean Parker. Of course. Totally left her dead by all of Silicon Valley except for Peter Thiel, who he delivered Facebook to. And then she says, Mark himself was someone who the world tried to write off after Netscape, make a poster child for the dot-com excesses. This is all making sense. Yeah. And then there's this kind of outlier tweet here about how, as for the Mark doesn't want high-density

housing in his hood, he isn't particularly social. And he's also on the board of the world's largest social media company. I don't see how that's super relevant. Okay. That's a hot take. You don't have to agree with it. It's a hot take. You don't have to agree with it.

But she's right. I mean, we tried to make this point over and over again to people, you know. And I think the way I said it yesterday was if you're credibly audacious, past shenanigans are easily looked over. I'm working on like a Jason's second rule of startups or founders. So you have that first one. And then this is a second one that's like a corollary, which is if you're Credibly audacious. You've taken a company public, the company changed the world, company defined a category, whatever it is. Or even if you failed, but it was it was like audacious.

Became a noun. Like the Buffett rule, you know? The Buffett investing really is like, I don't really do tech. But if it's a noun, I'm into it or a verb. Sure. Yeah. I take it. You take an Uber or. Yeah. You don't we work something, but you get a we work. Right. So you would, if you said, just get a we work. Shorthand. It's like Kleenex. You know. A we work means an office share. So even if you. got it at another place, it would still be a we work. Right. So if it either becomes a verb or a noun shorthand, you know, that's a big deal. You door dashed it. You Googled it. She also, Sarah Lacey also point out, as for the check size, do you know how much they have under management?

See Quibi. It can totally blow up and not dent the fund. She said, I've been in the Valley since 99. I'm so sick of the group thinking covering it. We can be morally outraged all the time, whether the market is up or down. We can also look at business fundamentals. We can be intellectually honest about what we are critiquing and consistent. Whoa.

Whoa. Yep. That is interesting comments coming from Sarah, who has been quite, yeah. Yeah. I don't want to say it. But okay. Anyway, I would love to read these tweets, but she still got me blocked over Uber. Oh, wah-waw.

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And it was sort of interesting as the day went on and the couple of days to see The 48 hours? The 48 hours, exactly. And then really, I think one of the best tweets of all time, possibly. Talia Goldberg tweeted. This is good. Really want to meet Adam Newman and see if he can hypnotize me or if I'm too powerful, if I'm powerful enough to resist. Tully.

It's a great tweet. That's 10 of 10. None of us are. 10 of 10. I would steal it. 10 of 10. I would steal that tweet. It's outstanding.

And also, no one can. He's like Emperor Palpatine. Shout out Talia. Give me another follow right now. never call me Adam Newman I will write a check I can't be trusted I thought for the ladies out there I would do a little meme tweet a little joke so here's my meme tweet because a lot of women I mean people were the the counter Sarah Lacey's counter is to people were like oh my god this is unfair it says something about gender it says something about whatever well there again we pointed this out there are all these underrepresented founders particularly women who can't even get a meeting and this guy can get you know a billion dollars in total just by hypnotizing people. Yeah. I tweeted you on this one actually.

Yeah, go for it. So I was just like, you know what this reminds me of? Like, can you imagine you're a female founder who had a meeting at A16Z this week with a male partner? Like, how does that meeting start? Yeah. And, you know, if a woman did say like, oh, yeah, congrats on the we work. I'm sorry, the flow investment. they'd be like

Adam created an entire category residential is ready to be disrupted and you can see here this is the meme of the woman who looks like Heather Graham being yelled at by a short king with the arms the size of his own chest who's yeah with a guy whose arm

is literally bigger than his skull I didn't know that was physically anatomically possible with a serious with a serious devops beard that's the devops spirit. And look, there it is. This week and start out is Jason Gallaghanacadison.

Oh, it's going to stick. It's me. He manspleting to Molly. Oh, if you guys can't say it, we just made a version of this. As our new podcast, aren't? Yeah. We need to make one of these with U.S. Calici. We're having fun today.

We have to make one of these of U.S. Calisi and then me as another Game of Thrones character. Oh, my God. Seriously. This is incredible. I mean, this meme. I'm just going to the audience right now. If you can make a better meme than this, I'm sending you $100 worth of liquid

IV. This meme is classic. Just have added, folks. Can you just put out that this week in startups overlay Nick for people as a reply tweet to this? And feel free to tweet this, but anyway, that was my... This is unbelievable. This, that was good. I retweeted that one today. That was very funny. Thank you. Thank you. In serious to this, how should, what is the proper contextualization framing that you put on this as a female. Capital Allocator. Looking at this. Is it actually an issue of gender?

Does it speak to some larger issue? Or as Sarah's saying, hey, let's be intellectually honest. You know, people who are mavericks get funding. It's both. It's always both. And it's always going to be both. Because there's not like,

there's not like some things that are sexist and some things that are not. You sort of like think of these things as a condition. We're a sexist society. with discrimination built in. Full stop, right? Like, from the beginning. Yeah.

So there is always going to be some aspect of that. Adam Newman got funded the first time, right? For being having a huge vision and being like a tall, handsome guy with great hair. Hair like a prince will get you, you know, be the first meeting, no doubt. Amazing salesperson, right? And he's a super amazing. He is. He's the Emperor Palpatine of selling.

Like, you cannot resist. this the guy? He's literally got that Jedi mind trick down, but also end. Exactly, it's and, it's all and. It's always end, to your point. And he, what people forget is, so yes, he's being given

like a huge swath of cash here before the products even launched. That is like notable. So you have to work backwards. Okay, let's talk about his first company. Oh, Masa gave him. It's a red flag. It's a red flag. Masa gave him a huge amount of money.

And that was like, whoa, how do we process this, right? But then you have to go backwards. Green desk. The guy had a vision for shared office space. He had a failed startup, well, not failed. He had a middling project Green Desk that he barely owned because he had a partner on it. He wound up selling it to them, as you saw, and then creating WeWork. So he was a bootstrapping founder. He was the bootstrapper's bootstrapper. Yeah. So for people to look at him now and say, oh my God, it's a privilege issue. sure, there's privilege. Nobody's going to say there's not privilege,

it's not unfair, you know, bias in the world. But this is not that. I don't think this is his privilege issue right here. He is somebody who started as a bootstrapper, built a credible company. It went off the rails with Masa Yoshesan, giving up absurd amounts of money, which said more about Masa than Adam.

That was Masa. You know, Adam Newman was just like fireball and he just walked into like a gas refinery. Right. That is very true. It just was random. Very true. And you guys did a great job talking about that on All In about SoftBank finding itself

in this position where it just had to not only deploy capital quickly, but a ton and absurd amount of capital quickly. Two billion a month. And so you hand a toddler. So $2 billion a week. Right. Like you hand a toddler like a machete and a fire deflame thrower. Yeah.

And like stuff gets destroyed and burned down. Yes. Right. But then the question is, is Mark Masa now? Did he just hand the same, right? This is the thing we don't know is did he just hand the same toddler? Yeah.

The same dangerous tools. And we have no idea. Like, I more than one time have referenced that deal book interview that Adam Newman did with Andrew Ross Orkin after we crashed came out, where he sold us all. Like, we all watched that interview and we're like, I unironically would give him money again. There's no doubt about it. And there's no, and I would be super clear, there is no indication whatsoever. in that interview that he learned any lessons at all. No, it wasn't like a super remorseful thing, no.

No, I still was like, that guy is as charming as a literal cobra snake charmer. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. If he, like, literally came and said, I'm, I've got an idea for mobile hot dog delivery. It's a stand, you push it, and you can order a hot dog over an app, and they'll put sourcrow on it, you know, they'll put onions on it, mustard, whatever you want. And we're only delivering on Island Boulevard. We're all in.

And our second location is going to be on the Staten Island Ferry. So it's incredible brand extension. Does that embrace all the other issues that there are? Those issues are true. They exist. Like women don't get funded enough in people of color and old people and all kinds of underrepresented founders. And also, this guy is a GD Ninja. Exactly.

I think that's all the reactions we got, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's pretty good there. It's pretty good reaction. So, oh, but oh, you're not going to believe this, Molly. This is one of the, it's the power of the podcast. People are sending me,

leaks from inside of Flow. You're not going to believe this, but there's a brand extension coming. And they built a landing page for it, and somebody just tipped me off. I got to somebody sent to my DMs. Check this out. Apparently,

floatacilla.com is up, and you can sign up for updates. Wow. Go ahead and sign up there, Jason at Calicatatans.com. Let's make sure I'm, okay, well, I'm going to get emails about Flowtequila.

I can't wait for this to launch. Oh, my goodness, a tequila club. Like I've always, been waiting for. Well, who knows? I mean, it's a flow brand extension. But interesting, you know, he liked to throw those camping parties.

There's a community around tequila. And the raves and everything like that. This is a different person leaking from inside Newman's. This is two separate DMs. I mean, I suppose these could be same person, two different burner accounts. But look at this one's coming. There's another flow brand extension coming. I can't believe it.

And this one to me makes a lot of sense because you've got young people that have apartments. This makes a lot of sense to me, maybe more so than flow tequila. But flowrave.com is up and running. And I totally want to go to a flow rave with Adam Newman. So flow raves are coming. This is how good this guy is. He can bring raves back. He's going to bring raves back.

But you know, a lot of people have asked him, Do we pay for all these? Don't ruin the bet. A lot of people have asked, like, what happens, you know, to people, you know, are they going to outgrow being part of the flow brand? And the same thing. speaker told me like not only Flo Rave and Flow Tequila, you know, great brand extensions right on right. Yeah. Adam Newman's brand. On brand. Yeah. This one's coming because he wants to do the full

life cycle of a, this is the full life cycle of his customer base. You're going to be able to go to Flowgrave.com. You'll be able to from tequila to grave. Toquilla. From rave to grave, the flow life experience. From rave to grave is their tagline. They said that's what they're working on as a tagline for flow. From rave to, from rave to grave to grave. This is this. Great. Really, we're helping to float that trial balloon, I think. Rave to Grave. Tell us what you think.

Producers at This Weekend Startups.com, we'd love to know what you think about. Maybe some interesting brand extensions. Tagline. Rave to Grave. We're beating this horse. And we'll continue to do so. We will continue to do so. This is going to be chef's kiss for the year.

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American Airlines is going to buy up to 20 commercial supersonic jets from Aircraft Maker and basically startup, Booms Supersonic. Yeah, they've been on the podcast. They were on episode 638, a mere 900 episodes ago. What a pace we're going at back in 2016. But, you know, I hear their business is booming.

Hey-ho. And never gets old. Never, people. To create an airplane company, a company that builds planes and call it boom, is audacious. Continue. Just as an aside.

You make an excellent if terrifying point. That is true. Tragedy Airlines was taken. Tragedy Airlines.com was already taken. Shrieking dissent. Too long. Via Reuters, this brings Booms total order book to 130 jets valued at $26 billion. American is actually the second U.S. airline to agree to purchase these jets.

And remember, supersonic jets are the ones that can fly at two times. the speed of today's fastest commercial aircraft. So they're not quite Concord level speed, but they're incredibly fast. They can allegedly fly from Miami to London in under five hours, cutting the standard nine-hour flight time in half, which would be amazing. Overture is the name of the jet.

Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and say, name the company overture. Drop the boom. Yeah. Drop the boom. I get it. I mean, I, not to explain the science.

Consumers hear boom, when one of these things blow up, the New York Post is going to be like, boom, go boom. Like, planes blow up. Tragically, one of these will blow up. And then it's going to be meme central. Whoopsy, airlines, yeah, boom goes boom is bad. That's, that's going to happen. That's really going to happen. So the overture.

Let's just continue to refer to it as the overture. That's a great idea. Has four engines can carry 65 to 80 passengers is designed to run on a more sustainable aviation fuel blend. and it looks cool as hell. But what is interesting about this, too, is, you know, I mean, I have been annoying you about various electric plane companies here and there because it's like so cool and you really want it to happen. But kudos to the makers of overture for creating an airplane startup.

Yeah, really hard. Yeah. Any hardware is hard. And this is like as hard as hard where it gets. I mean, right? I would think so. Rockets. It's also.

It would be harder. Rockets, yeah. Pretty different. Evidently, Boom said the overture is designed to be 75% less expensive than the Concord for airlines to operate. So the cost of the ticket doesn't have to be so high. So a Concord ticket apparently was 30 times more expensive than an average ticket. It was 5,000 each way in the 80s and 90s to go from New York to London. Of course, the issue was you could not fly these over land. and two of them, I think, blew up was the problem with the Concord.

One of them was because the wheels or something lit on fires, but I think there were two major accidents. Somebody will correct me on that. And you can't go over land because of that sonic boom. Right. And so Overture said they're going to try to make it less boomy. So I guess the concept was you could fly it over, if let's say you were flying from Austin.

You could, I guess, fly non-superonic speed, and then when you get over the water, you could turn it up. I guess so, right. I mean, they don't go as fast as the concrete either way, so maybe it's just not as much of a sound. So the timeline is still, I mean, hardware is hard.

We should say that these jets have been ordered, but the timeline is no joke. 2025 is when they're expected to come off their production line. 2026 is when they're expected to start test flights and will not, they're projecting, they'll carry their first passengers not until 2029. And then evidently,

the deal has some conditions. So American Airlines agreed to buy these planes, but I think are not, would not have to buy them if they don't deliver in time. Yeah. And all of these letters of intent, LOIs, purchase orders, you know, like if this company was going public, you remember the Niccolo controversies, the one that was making the vans for Amazon that Amazon on 10% of, like all of these letters have out clauses in them. Some of there are not binding, the payment terms. So if you were looking at companies, you really, if you're making a j-trade on a public company or doing a private investment, you just want to know. But it's a, I say letters of intent are, you know, totally, I don't even count them as any revenue. Yeah. They're usually just press releases, to be honest. And so I think that's what this is. I'm not meaning to be cynical, but I don't really give this any credence, because you can back out of it. And it's just an option. Now, if they paid in full or it was an amount of money that was significant to the individual, then you can look at it differently. I'll give you two examples. With the roadster, you had to pay up front $150,000 and then wait three years

for that Tesla Roadster. Dang. For the Model S, you had to pay in full $120,000 and wait two years or three years, whatever it was. And I have both of those. I have the signature 16 and the signature number one. But then when they did the model three, I think it was $1,000. I think it was $1,000. I think for the cyber truck was $500. So, you know, the full. So, okay, that's non-refundable. You get the cash in the bank. If the company goes out, you lose your money. So if that was the case here, great.

Then you look at, you know, $1,000 on a $50,000, $2%. So if these planes are going to cost $200 million each or whatever they, $100 million, they're probably going to cost $100, $200 million, maybe $200 million, I'm guessing. Private jets like top out of $50,60, and then the, you know, commercial jets are in that 200 range. It makes sense, right? You think about a 20-year lifespan of them, yada, yada, and what they can do in generate revenue.

if they received but 2%, the same as the model 3, I would be super impressed by this. Right. Because 2% would be 4 million per jet, 4 million per jet, 100 jets ordered, 400 million in revenue.

They may have collected that, I don't know. Maybe to get your reservation and be in line, you have to put down 2%, 3%, so there would be skin in the game and it would be non-refundable. So that's what the devil's would be in the detail. That's a good way to evaluate those types of,

Yeah. Deals when they come in the door too. Yeah. Well, when we look at deals. L.I. Nick, someone is a great, that is a great V.C. Sunday school topic. Yeah. How to account for letters of intent, pre-orders, on kickstaters.

Molly, you see that that's big in the climate space? Yes, because there's a lot of like big infrastructure hardware pitches, right? Like it's a, there's a like a desalination machine or an electric jet or power, a microgrid station for EB, chargers, right? There's this, that. There's a million different things. And it's all like, yeah, we have an LOI for burglians of dollars. The LOIs are always for burglians. It's a letter of nothing. It's a technical term. It's what I refer to them as. Letters of nothing. Berillions. Orders are orders. Letters of nothing are letters of nothing. So I like orders with cash deposits.

That makes sense. You know, I think when you look at it, pre-orders are incredible, incredible validation. because it means you have a customer who wants the product so badly, they're willing to give up their cash, knowing there's a chance they won't get it back and they want to see you succeed, which is the entirety of Kickstarter Indiogo why I love meeting founders who have raised on those platforms. There are problems with those platforms.

We'll talk about it when we do a VC Sunday school on this. But just back of the envelope math, you know, they said Concord tickets were like 30 times more, which makes sense. You know, they were $5,000 or $10,000 for a round trip. And back then, you know, flights were $200, right? I think in the 90s, I think we'd pay 300 bucks for a flight, you know, 500 bucks for a flight. So, you know, 20 times 500 is 10,000 or so.

And I think 5,000 was like the minimum of Concord flight would be. So that kind of is directionally correct. Today, interestingly, ticket prices actually haven't gone up all that much, with the exception of the bump in fuel costs recently because of the war in Ukraine. So today, 2019 flights were in domestic U.S. were 359. Probably international is probably 50% more than that, say, 500. And that's round trip. So 500 times 30 is 15,000. So I would say my guess is that overture tickets are going to be, if they said it's going to be 75% less, 75% less than 15K or 20K, I might put it at 20K, 75 less, 75 less, we 5,000.

I can't see these being less than 5,000 round trip. I would doubt that. It's got to be, I don't believe them. I don't believe their numbers. I think they're wrong or they're just being delusional. I can't see these tickets going for less than $15,000 round trip. Really? Yeah.

because I mean just look if you want because these are all going to be business class tickets by the way there's no coach there's no such things coach on these it's all it'll be one class and the class will be business and so I would say right now business class to London New York or Miami is going to be 10 to 20 grand business first class round trip I don't think they're going to

undercut it I don't buy it and I'm not sure about this jet fuel stuff being green all right everybody listen I love Brave I've been using Brave for the last couple of months and it is so much faster that any browser of used, and it doesn't have all of those ads and trackers and creepy stuff happening on my computer. They really have three core products built into Brave, the core browser, which is tight, and it has all these great extensions that just work.

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When they say jet fuel stuff is green, I think it's like. I have a lot of questions about sustainable. I think it's like 10% less. That's a word that's doing a lot of work in that sentence. Yeah, a lot of work. Should we be producing these, Molly? Is this what the world needs? Is this ethical or moral to produce these?

they're going to burn more fuel this thing's going to burn much more fuel per person would imagine it's going to burn much more fuel yeah and I'm not buying the idea twice as fast yeah like how much like a Bugatti Bayron

gets like a half a mile to the gallon going 200 miles an hour it's the I think it's like every 10 or 20 miles per hour above like 65 you go is some significant percentage more yeah right because you have to rev the engine that much hotter

and it takes much more energy So I have a feeling this is unconscionable on a fuel spent per person basis. Probably. And I think by 2029, you are actually going to see enough flight shaming. Like, I think that there's not even necessarily shaming, but incentives. Like, I think there's going to be significantly less flight because it is, you know, now we just bop around places without really thinking about it. And most of those, many, many, many of those trips are not necessarily. like there's no reason I need to fly across the country you know go to a bunch of cabs to go to a dinner

and come back yeah exactly from a I mean I did it for the next games right yeah no I mean anybody like anybody practicing business or something at a high level or fun at a high level which you practice has done some version of this and increasingly I think that's going to be start to be considered you know socially unacceptable it already has flight shaming in Europe is a thing um especially when you have a train system. So when I'm in Europe, I do like to take the trains, only because I enjoy it. I find it pleasurable. So I just love going from like pancreas station to guard nerd, guard, Nord, you know, the channel thing from London to Paris. I just find that more fun. I'd rather do that for three or four hours, you know, talk, have a coffee. And you know what I do is I go right

to the dining car. I spend the whole time in the dining car. I'm not going to love. Trains are so lovely. I go right to the dining car, I park, I'm keeping that table for the whole ride. Yeah. Not giving it up. But yeah, I mean, the only reason you think you need to get from, you know, Miami to London in five hours instead of nine

is because you think you have like a really important business meeting there. And by 2029, that's not going to be acceptable. And you're going to have VR meetings like I'd say, but you are. And it's just not. Or you'll have high speed trains. It's going to be necessary.

And you'll have self-driving. So you put all that together. There's no reason for planes to, fly in the northeast corridor of the United States. You can take Excella, you can take all these trains. There is no reason for people to be flying from New York to D.C., to Boston. That whole corridor, if they just made the trains 50 miles per hour faster, which is easily doable, you could just throw away all the planes in that area. Can you imagine how many planes come out of the air if you did that? Yeah. And then now you do Europe. Yeah. Like, does there need to be any

flights between London, Germany, you know, France? Like, what? I'm I'm not sure which countries have the best. On the continent? And also that you think about the, there's mountains, but, you know, if you can get better tunneling technology, there's really no reason for it, especially with high speed trains. If you can get these trains all to 150 miles per hour, 250 miles per hour, you'd see what happens in China and you see what happens in Japan. Yep.

You know, like just take the train. Like, why would you do anything else? It doesn't make any. It just had to make the trains more dope. Like, the train has to be more fun and just even more. easy. Just keep making the trains easier. Like subway level easy. None of that like buy a ticket and do the blah, blah, blah, do the whole thing. Like why am I buying a ticket? Like you get a smartphone, you get on. They should just, you get on. I love the conductor system. I love the past system. You know, just swipe. I told you

I ordered those bobas. I'm really loving the Apple watch lifestyle of paying for things and just quickly going through like clear, you know, does at airports. Those things I think mean more to people then they're being under, it's a being underestimated how much those little accruedramants mean to people. If you upgraded the food on these trains, upgraded the seating and upgraded the Wi-Fi, train consumption would go way up. Yeah. Just make it high speed. Put those, you know, low Earth orbit satellite star links on each train.

Yep. This is why I think we should subsidize trains. For sure. Subsidized trains. Yes. High-speed trains. And subsidize, um, e-bikes are my two pet peeves. But yeah, I would like to know.

what booms, and I'm not like on the company or anything. I hope people don't take it that way. I do think there's a case for having this. I just don't think this should be the default. So that's why I was sort of teeing it up to you. Do you think it's moral ethical? I like your answer. I think a lot of people are going to opt out when they find out how much fuel this burns. And then for other people, if you're a dignitary, if you're a CEO,

if you're somebody who time is money, you know, if it's the president of the United States, if it's a senator, a congressperson, a CEO, and like, they just have a big schedule or, you know, they play for a basketball team or it's a musician. I actually look at those and I say, you know what? People were giving Katie Perry or somebody a hard time about their jet. I can't remember who it was. Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift. And I'm like, you know how much Joy Taylor Swift brings people when she plays to a stadium? I'm fine with her burning a hundred times as much jet fuel because she's

flying to a stadium to make 30,000 people have a great night. It's totally fine. As opposed to those people going and slapping to her backyard. Better to fly her there quick in style. and let people have that joy. Just like having a basketball team go from place to place. The basketball teams wouldn't be able to do the thing that entertains us all, you know, these cross-country flights to do, you know, the Warriors versus the Bulls, whatever. That's why they used to play regionally is because they were driving Greyhound buses.

Right. Or taking commercial. So they would only play people in their own division, you know, the Atlantic division, played the Atlantic division over and over again. You'd be like, wow, I wonder what's going to happen when they play in the Western division, you know, or Pacific, whatever, you know, play. Okay, I guess we move on. Yes, congratulations.

Seems like it's going to work. Congratulations to boom. Yeah, it's going to work. It's going to work. Probably. Let's go. Overture. Should we do a super quick, happy startup of the day? We have a really happy startup of the day.

This is just a freaking heart warmer. I saw this article in Bloomberg this morning. Are you familiar with Tata group? Like Tata is the big car maker in India, among I think, other things, this company. Raton Tata is an. Indian industrialist, and he just made, this is sort of like a series A slash startup of the day announcement, just made a seed investment into a startup that connects young people with senior citizens. Rutan Tata himself is 85 years old. Okay. And put this investment into this

company that's called Goodfellows. And the goal of it is to promote intergenerational friendships. Basically, to connect seniors with recent graduates and allow them to, like, if you're the senior, then the graduates can accompany you on errands, do technology tutoring and assistance, visit the doctor with you, join you on walks, go to curated events. And Tata gave this quote and said, you don't know what it's like to be lonely until you spend time alone wishing for companionship. You don't mind getting old until you get old and you find it's a difficult world. It's a great startup idea. We actually had a startup doing similar thing. Papa.com. We had the founder on this week

at startups at one point and Papa.com does it here and Papa gets insurance they get reimbursed by insurance so what Papa was doing is you don't have to bathe the person or you know

do some of those or you know high end stuff right it's not like caretaking necessarily you take them shopping you have dinner with them you play a board game you do errands

and so Papa's been doing this and companionship services you know we were talking Molly before like what happens when these jobs go away. I wonder if we were talking about that. Was that Monday on the... It was Monday.

Yesterday. It was yesterday. Monday was Adam Newman, work from home. Remember I said like call support jobs, SDRs, designers, video editors, you know, on the, all of these jobs on the bottom half, let's say, of that category and increasing are going to be outsourced. So what do you do with all these people? And I said, well, there's entry-level jobs that are super important to have in society. This is the perfect one. You graduate from high school of college.

you make 40 bucks an hour, 30 bucks an hour, hanging out with some dope, you know, old lady, old guy. Like, unbelievably accomplished person who can mentor you or, you know, or not. But either way you're going to learn, tell you stories, yeah. Yeah, can you imagine they're telling you stories? Like, if this was somebody who was 30 years old in the 60s, right, and they experienced the 60s as a 30-year-old, right? They got great memories where the 70s as a 30-year-old.

Wow. So they lived through each of those, they would be now, if you were 30 years old in 1960, you would add 60 years to that. You'd be 90. You'd be 90. And you would have seen.

Well, you'd be 80 if you experienced the 70s as a 30 year old. Can you imagine their stories of like boogie night stories or like Woodstock stories or Vietnam era? Like, man, I would love to sit with somebody who was 85 years old and play checkers or

whatever, go have a coffee. And I was in my 20s and get 30s. and get $30 an hour to do that? This company was founded by a 30-year-old who says, actually, that the idea for the startup came from becoming friends with Ritantata. So Shantanu Nidu is the founder who manages Tata's family office, it sounds like, in startup investment portfolio.

And they had this friendship. They just really had a great rapport and then decided that this should be a company. And apparently getting, I mean, it's also just a really interesting story about a like magnet. that tons of people have never heard of. Yeah, Tata, people don't know this, but Tata produced a $2,000 car at one point. Now, I don't know if you want to drive in that car. I don't know.

It's like on much safety, but they were unbelievable at, and maybe one of the producers can find one of these Tata cars and what they cost in U.S. dollars. But it was unbelievable what they were able to make. And then continuing today, I think they make some pretty amazing gas mileage cars. Tata himself turned around the tradition bound 160-year-old steel to airlines group that is great grandfather founded and then has turned into this kind of like investing star. He became an angel and he's backed over 50 startups including the Iwear retailer lens cart, digital payments brand pay TM, an electric vehicle startup, an online stock trading platform. He's like the best. What do you think? Group of.

Oh yeah, there it is. The Tata Nano. I remember this car. That's just such an interesting story. I wonder what that cost in USDs. I remember it was three or five. 4,000. I think it was, yeah. Oh, wow, Tata, the world's cheapest car, the Tata Group's Nano that sells for $2,500 in India may find a place in the U.S. garages. Tata Nano may come to the U.S.

a $5,000 price tag. I mean, that would be crazy. That'd be crazy. Oh, I guess they'd stop making them. Or they're stopping to make them. Anyway, it's a really nice start-up of the day. Really nice. Very nice. Very nice. Isn't that amazing, though, that like a mountain, an e-mountain bike costs five to 10 to 15 grand, depending on which one you get? You can buy two tattas or three tata nannos for the same price that seat four people. Yeah. Pretty crazy. I think the way they did that was those cars, I could be wrong, somebody will fact check me,

but there was a whole movement of taking a scooter or engines from motorcycles, putting them in cars that were lightweight that are meant to go under 55 miles an hour. You know, like, almost like their golf carts. But it is super heartwarming. I'm sorry. It is super heartwarming. Jason's like, I just want to talk about. about the cars and the electric bikes.

I'm like, dude, old people are getting friends. It's heartwarming. Good job, good job. And shout out to Papa, right. Shout out. Shout out to Papa. Up next on the show, because you think it's over, but it's not. It's not.

Another edition of everyone's other favorite J-Trades and the blueprint, just like hits. You're just the hitmaker. There you go. This weekend, climate and VC Sunday school. Killing it. All right, everybody. Welcome back to the blueprint. This is episode six, part six of a 10-part, quick hit miniseries.

Can you believe we're now past the halfway mark amazing? I want to get right into it today. I want to talk about how to get ahead of trends. How to master future mediums? I get asked us all the time, how did you get in early on Twitter? Twitter.com slash Jason. How did you get in early on zines in the 90s? How'd you get in early on the internet itself?

How'd you get in early on blogging and sell weblogs ink before most people even knew what blogs were? How'd you get in early on angel investing and syndicates? How'd you get in early on podcasting? I get this question all the time. And so I'm going to give you a couple of frameworks here, just different ways to frame how you look at the world, right? So framing is critically important. If you look up behavioral psychology, organizational psychology, you'll find something called framing.

It's a school of thought, it's a technique, how you look at the world. So I like to talk to people about how they frame things. When you first look at something and you spot something very early, let's say it's TikTok. Your friend tells you about it. Uber, DoorDash, Airbnb, Twitter, podcasting, pick a trend. Could be NFTs, right? Blockchain, Bitcoin. It's very easy to look at something. And humans take a very pessimistic view early on.

We're scared creatures. Why are we scared creatures? Why do we take a pessimistic view at the new? Well, we take a pessimistic view at the new for a reason. when you meet something new in nature and you're like wow look at that big furry thing and then it shows you these giant fangs you're like oh that's a mountain lion the people who would run up and be like oh there's something new let's give it a hug would get eaten or they would be like let's try this piece of fruit and it would be poisonous right so we're conservative being conservative in nature in dna avoiding new things really does make you live longer new thing might be a river that you come across somebody jumps in the river they try to swim across it Alligator gets them. The tide gets them. Boom. They just get pulled by the rush of the river and go off a thousand foot waterfall. You get the idea. So you have to retrain yourself to be an early adopter. And there's this, of course, chart that you see all the time, early adopters on one side,

laggers on the other and the majority, right? And there's like the faster majority and the slow majority of people when they adopt technology or trends. I like to, as an individual, look at these new trends, and instead of being scared of them, I like to be curious about them, right? And I like to look at them and say to myself, what if they work, right? And so you want to anticipate that these things that look like they're not going to work are going to become something big. And usually it takes three, four, five tries for something to actually stick. That's one thing I've learned in technology. So, you know, we had things like six degrees of separation in the 90s. Then you had friends are in MySpace. You had all these attempts at social networking. And it eventually got to

MySpace, Friendster, and then this knockoff company called Facebook that just knocked off what Friendster was doing. If you look at the original designs, it looks pretty similar. But Friendster couldn't be kept up and running. And Myspace let people design their own pages like GeoCities did before that, which was another community. And GeoCities and MySpace looked sloppy and wasn't organized. So it was hard to get adoption. Long story short, those things basically were the precursors to what eventually became social networking. So if you, were early to MySpace, but we're cynical about Friendster and Facebook, you might have missed being an influencer or really leveraging social media and building companies in that space,

like Instagram or now even TikTok. If you take the time between when TikTok showed up and when six degrees was around, it's over 20 years, actually. Or, you know, when MySpace was around, you're talking about the 2005 era, 2006 era of social networking to now, you know, it's coming on 20 years. And then you have TikTok show up. So things can still show up later on that become big. What I do when I see these things is I assume they're going to work. I assume Twitter was going to work and I just totally engaged it. I was the number two user on Twitter at one point in time.

I kid you not in the first year. It was Robert Schoble myself and then this Senator Barack Obama who was running for president and was in the primaries and was wowing everybody in the primaries. And he also had nothing to lose and so early adopted. So you want to anticipate that changes are coming. you want to look at the early projects and have a very open mind. Now you're going to be like, oh, JCal, you've been so not open minded to crypto. No, not true.

I had Bitcoin and I wrote a story about Bitcoin when it was under a dollar. I was concerned about all the frauds going on. But, you know, with all those frauds going on, that was different than me looking at the fundamental core technology and saying, hey, there's something interesting here. I still think there's some interesting things as in terms of more internet from it. So assume things are going to work. You know, you don't want to give up on these. new platforms, you want to be curious and investigate them. I did this a number of times. I told you

about Twitter. I also did it with blogging and I did it with podcasting. When I started in podcasting, it was literally an iPod. And before I did, you know, you would basically upload your MP3 file and that it would use a piece of software, which called a pod catcher at the time, which would take a download on your desktop of an MP3 and put it into an album. It would hack the iPod and create an album called podcasting and it would just put a file there. There were no RSS feeds. you know, with all the fancy episode numbers and everything back then. The standard was very, very janky. But Dave Weiner created that standard, RSS in the 90s. Then they included audio links in it. Then the Apple iTunes store began supporting it. And that's where you see that

famous clip of me asking Steve Jobs about Apple's support of podcasting. We'll play that clip right now. Will you be able to add any RSS feed to the, or any podcast's RSS feed to iTunes? Or is it only through the store. Oh, you'll be able to add anything you want, completely open, we're just working with the open standards out there, yeah. And will you help companies like ours sell podcasts, you know, be an audible?

So if we wanted to sell a podcast through your service, would you help us do the fulfillment? You know, we're planning on having all the podcasts be free at first, but zing me an email with what you've got in mind, and we're open to anything. Same email I always send it to you? Yep. Okay, you got it.

So I just believed in it. And with my friend Brian, Alvi when we did weblogs Inc. I just believed in it early. Uh, and in fact, he was, uh, on the podcast recently. Some people say I sold weblogs Inc to early. Certainly, if I kept running it, it would have been worth more. But I needed the money then because I had no money. Somebody offered me a lot more money than it was worth at the time. So I had no choice but to take it. And nobody knew at that time that some crazy Swedish streaming service, uh, would then decide to go into podcasting or that this crazy Swedish music streaming startup called Spotify would actually,

be anything and figure out streaming music. So all these weird things will happen. And in fact, I wrote a blog post. Here is that blog post. The blog post I wrote in 2015, after I had been blogging, I had been podcasting for six or seven years at that time. And previously I had been doing streaming. We had real networks and we used to stream live radio shows. Anyway, I said, Howard Stern should get out of, terrestrial, should get out of satellite radio, just like he left terrestrial radio for satellites, Sir SXM. And he should go, do. a deal with Spotify or just start offering his subscription directly or Apple should sign him up for iTunes and add this as a content offering. Well, five years later, Joe Rogan signed a hundred

million dollar deal. And a lot of people think Joe Rogan is the successor to Howard Stern in terms of doing long-form interviews. And certainly Joe Rogan has talked many times about how, you know, he was a big influence. So that blog title was Howard Stern's easy billion dollar payday courtesy of Spotify or an app. And I'll just read you this little excerpt that I wrote, because I think it is telling. It's time for Howard to leave satellite and go direct to consumers or join Spotify.

Either of these will make him $1 billion. Here's what Howard's 3.0, Howard 3.0 would look like. 1.0 was terrestrial, 2.0. Satellite. 1.00 was satellite. No more waking up to 4 a.m. and worrying about not being able to take Beth to parties,

that's his wife. If you want to start at 10 a.m. or 1 p.m. or 10 p.m., go for it. What I'm pointing out here is, like, he wouldn't be tied to like a schedule, right? And that's exactly what's appealing about podcasting. Howard tapes his show from anywhere at any time. time. Want to stay out in the Hamptons? Tape when you're in LA. Sure, go set up a couple of microphones and just go. Howard famously built a studio in LA, started to do, or Sirius XM, built one out there.

He did some interviews. And then he now tapes from his basement at his Hampton's home, because of COVID. So those two things have all come to pass. And Howard started doing shows later in the day, et cetera. Three, never have a boss. Howard could not have to negotiate with SiriusXM. Four, provide your entire catalog free or for subscribers on the internet. Okay. What is the archive of Joe Rogan Worth? Rogan tapes at any time. He does it from Texas. He does it from wherever he is. He can do it when he's on the road. And he's got this huge archive, which is what Spotify really wanted to get on there, right? They get that whole catalog, minus the ones that they felt were too spicy for some of their employees,

I guess, who were, or, you know, maybe sponsors who weren't happy with them. And then allow fans to remix and make clips from the archives and repost to your site. That last one is pretty interesting. Basically, what people are doing now with our clips on TikTok in other places. So anyway, I did all that math. And I just said, in that piece, I said, Howard Stern could easily drive one million new subs for Spotify, which at $10 a month would generate $120 million a year, $560 million market cap increase. And so when I did that math, it actually follows exactly like the Joe Rogan math, almost to a scary amount possibly because they gave Joe Rogan, I believe, $200 million or something for a couple of years. And so this is how you can

predict the future. You just assume it's going to work. And when you assume it's going to work, oh my Lord, do you seem clairvoyant? Because a lot of things work. Now, most things don't, but a lot of things do. And the benefit you get from believing in a platform early or believing in a technology early is you get to reap the rewards because you get to understand it and build before anybody else even knows what it is. Now, sometimes you can go off on a rabbit hunt. People who are in VR spent 30 years building VR experiences and they threw it all away.

Nobody ever really used their technology, right? And to this day, VR is still minor. people who were in early on VR, though, this is what Zuckerberg is hoping. Maybe they become the standard and they reap the reward. And so all of that, you know, when I was talking about Howard Stern, you know, having subscribers possibly and podcasters driving subscriptions for a platform like Spotify, you know, when I was talking about that, it was, it's very interesting because it also put me on the road to appreciating other subscription businesses.

We famously invested in com.com before anybody else believed in consumer subscriptions. and they said that's stupid, who's going to pay money to buy meditation content you can get free on YouTube? And they got millions of subscribers. And then we did FitBot and Steezy, tone base, and Fluent Forever, and Musician. We found other reoccurring consumer subscriptions, and of course that's led me to do J-trading in Warner Brothers Discovery and Disney because of Disney Plus. I figured out early just because of my use of podcasting that subscriptions would be coming, and then it led to me investing in a much of companies. Now, I missed some.

I passed on MasterClaff. I didn't get an opportunity to invest in Shrava, but I use slopes for skiing. I use zero for fasting. Consumer subscriptions have become amazing businesses. So what you might learn from getting in early on something is not just how it applies to that one company, but how it applies to all of business.

Right, now there's a final word here. You're saying, hey, what about fads? What about things that fade? All right, let's think about the cost, the downside risk. Let's say you went all in on VR in the 90s, and it didn't become something. Well, you may have learned that hardware is really hard, and you may have learned that processors are not ready to do the fidelity, or screens are not ready to do the fidelity that is necessary for VR.

So what do you do? Well, just like Steve Jobs, they presented him with the iPad first, and he's like, you know what, this touchscreen isn't very responsive, the battery life sucks? What if you made a small one, and we made a phone first? And he famously said, phone, then iPad. because if we wait to do the iPad in a couple years, we'll have sold a bunch of these phones, we'll know how the touchscreen works,

we'll get the battery life better, we'll get the processors will be faster, and then the iPad will be snappier. And anybody who used the original iPad, it didn't feel very snappy. Can you imagine if it was released three years earlier and had a bigger screen and more to process? Exactly.

Now, and you look at NFTs right now. Do I think board apes and, you know, this other NFTs are going to be around in 10 years? I don't. I actually think, you know, board ape club and, you know, all these other, you know, popular ones. I think they're probably going to be remembered as Beanie Babies. They'll trade for nothing.

They'll be like some weird group of people who's really into them, like people are into Dungeons and Dragons or, you know, certain comic books or whatever. I don't think that those are actually going to be the winners. It's possible they were. Was this one like Cryptopunks? I think all of those will trend, you know, down as new or better ones. So these ones will be the Friendster and the MySpace. Gourd apes,

Cryptopunks, if you own them, I would sell half your position if you're up, if you can fractionalize it or if you own two, sell one and bank that money because I think they go the way

of, I'm not kidding, MySpace and Friends Switches, they'll be the precursor to some Facebook, Instagram, TikTok that's yet to come. Something more sophisticated

with more features that's faster, better, and delights users more has more utility in the world. Now, what does that mean for you? Well,

part of understanding this is having played with those. So I used to play with all the social, you know, products out there, Flickr, had friends and, you know, before, you know, Facebook even existed. So you can learn a lot by playing with a fad and then apply it to the next one that arrives. Industry changing trends, they continue to repeat and rhyme. And so once you get into it, you have that flow, just like Eminem can just rap. And when he talks, he just talks and rap sometimes. So you've ever seen that great Anderson Cooper or 60 Minutes interview,

you realize the guy has been rhyming words so often and been thinking about how to rhyme words that it's preternatural for him. It makes him really just understand the chess board in a way that like a grand master does. And there are people who are so good at poker that they can just read what's happening in the situation one, two, three, four, five, ten percent better

than anybody else at the table. Or some people, when they're playing chess, just kind of get a feel for it, right? It becomes intuitive. Well, what I hope for you is you start examining quote unquote fads, you know, which are attempts to change the world. And you start looking at those trends and become good at spotting trends early, evaluating them, understanding them, being curious about them, investigating them, soaking in them. And then you'll just become so much more clever at spotting the next one and exploiting the next one. And that's really what I've made a career of, right?

I've really just been able to understand these new mediums. Newsletters is what I didn't even bring up here. I've been doing newsletters since the 90s, and I figured out how newsletters work, and inside.com is crushing it on newsletter. So I hope this helps. I hope you enjoyed the blueprint. All 10 parts will live at this week

and startups.com slash the blueprint. And we'll make short videos out of this. Hey, if you want to impress me, I'd love for somebody out there to take these TikToks and make me versions of them. If you make a great one, maybe I'll buy it from you on spec and put it on our YouTube channel. Or if you're a super fan, just do it because you want to

and you want the shout out, whichever you prefer. I'm happy to pay for it. or if you make a great one and trends on TikTok or YouTube shorts, I'm happy to shout you out or do your favor. All right, everybody. See you next time. Bye-bye.