This Week in Startups - Salesforce CEO questions WFH amid SaaS slowdown, OpenAI projects $1B revenue by 2024 & more | E1642

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

J+M start the show by breaking down the recent disruption at Salesforce and Marc Benioff's comments on remote work. (2:44) Then, they cover OpenAI projecting $1B in revenue by 2024 (57:25) and wrap with a new segment: Little Big Things! (1:14:33) (0:00) J+M tee up today's topics (2:44) Weekend catchup and disruption at Salesforce (15:44) Supergut - Get 30% off with code TWIST at https://supergut.com  (17:14) David Sacks tweets about the vicious cycle that Salesforce (and SaaS companies at large) will undergo, grading Benioff's feedback to employees (31:43) Fitbod - Get 25% off at https://fitbod.me/twist  (33:15) Remote management issues with thousands of employees, where remote work will wind up in 2023 (47:50) The Pharaohs are taking issue with their pyramids being empty (57:25) OpenAI is reportedly projecting $1B in revenue by 2024, plus another round of "Google Search or ChatGTP?" (1:14:33) Little Big Things: Instagram's new "Notes" feature FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1

All right, everybody. It is a big Monday energy day. It is. My Knicks are winning. I've been spending some time on the slopes, Molly. I am so enthusiastic on a Monday. Look at those endorphins. I love it.

You love to see it. We are going to have a great conversation today. First up, we're going to talk about Salesforce, CEO, Mark Benio. We just have a lot of other CEO vibes in the air. Questioning the productivity of recently hired employees. There has been a lot of chaos there. So we're going to talk about kind of like a little bit. bit about how CEOs respond to downturns and changing work environments. It's a good conversation

with a lot of nuance. A lot of nuance. Molly plays the role of the union leader, the workers, representative, and I play the founder executive class. We lean into it. And we talk about the big question, should young workers be forced to come into the office or should young, inexperienced workers in their first job, be allowed to work from home. You're going to be surprised by the answer. And then we talk about a report that opening AI is making 200 million a year and they project $1 billion next year and what that means.

Yes, what that means and how. And then just for fun, just to put Google on notice once again, another edition of Google or chat GPT. And then a new-ish feature. We've done it before, but we're making it more formal. little big things featuring

Instagram Instagram feature. Yeah. Oh yes. This is very good. But you're going to love round two of Google versus chat GPT. The answers might surprise you.

Everybody. It's going to be a great show. Stay with us. This week in startups is brought to you by SuperGut. The holidays are here. And between the eating, drinking, and traveling, for many of us, it can be a hard time to maintain good health. The secret to surviving them? A well-balanced gut. Supergut is the easiest and tastiest way,

scientifically proven, to boost gut health and all that comes with it, from weight loss to immunity. Get 30% off their delicious shakes, bars, and fiber mix at supergut.com by using code Twist and FitBod. Tired of doing the same workouts at the gym? FitBod will build you personalized workouts that help you progress with every set. Get 25% off your subscription or try out the app for free when you sign up now at FitBod. Me slash Twist. Hey, welcome back to Mondays, everybody.

It's Big Monday energy. How you feel, Molly? How you feel? So good. You look like you got Big Monday energy. I do have Big Monday energy. I'm fired up today. Good for you.

I had a nice Hanukkah dinner. I had to burn my sweater. Oh. You know, like, I don't know if you're familiar with Sunday night. Yeah, exactly. So I had a first night dinner. And I don't know if you're familiar with the way that the first night dinner goes, but you only wear an outfit there you are prepared to burn.

Because if you enter a house in which Lottkas have been made, you leave and your sweater forever smells like grease and onions, which is the best part of first night. But you got to just dump that thing. Lockers are my favorite. I used to go in the Lowery side. It'd be one or two in the morning, maybe even three or four. We'd be getting out of a club.

We'd be hungry. And we would go to the Lower Side. We'd go to a place called Velsaka. And then there was another place called Odessa on Avenue A. And we couldn't afford stuff, but they would have like six pierogis or two loquas. They were like a dollar each, two dollars each. And we go eat pierogi with onion and apples sauce. Brogis so good.

Lakas with set up our cream and grilled onions. And it was just all the poor kids. plus the Ramones I kid you not as in Joey oh hey hey Joey Ramon oh okay

he lived on he lived on like A and St. Mark's area so this is New York in the 90s you all missed it I'll keep telling

90s New York stories of the day I die it was just the greatest era ever but there was a lot of news going down here and I just want to

I mean the top I have to make a statement since there's so much breaking news and I didn't even prepare Molly for this. I know. So sit down, Molly, and let me break this news to you. Do I need my red flag? Yes or no? It is critically important that I make the statement here. There's a lot of

polls going on, a lot of emotions, and I've given it a lot of thought, and I'm fully in support of Bob Eiger coming back to Disney. Okay, let's get to the news. Okay. There's a lot of CEO news, and I just want to say. A lot of CEO news over the weekend. I've been getting texted by Bloomberg, by Wall Street Journal of Washington Post. Everybody wants to know my opinion. They said, hey, can we talk to you about the CEO job? And I said, I think Bob Eiger should take it. And so that's my final statement.

I'm going to keep it at that. Yeah. In other CEO news that I will be asking you to comment on this show. Okay, here we go. Sales Force CEO, Mark Benioff. Keep the bit going. Made waves over the weekend on his company's internal slack. Okay, so I've been waiting.

Many people have been waiting for the big dishy, what the heck is going on at Salesforce article. Because there's been a lot of disruption at Salesforce recently. So by way of context for this setup, Salesforce has had a bunch of high profile departures in a short period of time, right? So co-CEO, Brett Taylor and Slack CEO, Stuart Butterfield left in the same week. Lost in that week, Tableau CEO, Mark Nelson, Tablo, of course, having been acquired by Salesforce. also announced that he was stepping down just days apart.

The company lost a CTO in that same week. All of them said, oh, this is just coincidence. But then Business Insider recently published a list of 21 Salesforce executives that have left in the past year. Like high-level people. Okay. You know, that is a big number. We don't know the denominator.

So there's that. Right. I mean, they have however many, you know, but it's like some. former CEOs. It's a lot of, it seems like, CEOs of companies that Salesforce acquired, but not completely. The former chief innovation officer. Which is normal. What's the name? Stuart left after the two year of S, right? Right. That's normal. But you had your, let's see, chief strategy officer and chief revenue officer, SVP and general manager of trailhead,

SVP of marketing, COO of marketing, executive vice president of sales, EVP of Chief Customer Technology or EVP and Chief Customer Technology Officer and so on and so forth, right? General Manager of Marketing Cloud, SVP and GM of Experience Cloud, like a lot of execs, a lot of executive level departures.

So there were, Wall Street Journal did publish kind of a dissey report that was a little bit Bob on Bob. We are going to talk about the Bob's later about Benny Off and Brett Taylor and the tension there and how Benny Off didn't like where Taylor was spending his time.

He thought he was spending a lot of time at Twitter, for example. Oh, yes. Because that was during the acquisition or not acquisition moment in time. And he was, I believe, I don't have information here, as far as that is for some people to believe. Just what I read in the news was he was, you know, running point on that if I, if that's correct. So there you go. Steps into the limelight.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. So that's annoying. By the way, that's particularly annoying to Bening off for two reasons. number one he tried to buy Twitter

so it's annoying that's something he liked you know it's like a toy it's like for you and I it would be like a beautiful car or a house we really coveted right for a Benny Off

or other executives who have the ability to buy such things it's like a nice it's a jewel it's a jewel property what do they call those properties like showcase properties you know like if you're into homes

Everybody's into homes. Hero property. Yeah. I don't know. It's like buying like a castle or the best house, you know, in London, the best, you know, town home in Manhattan, whatever it is. It's a trophy property. So we're looking for a trophy. Trophy.

It's a trophy property. So, you know, to have Brett then being involved with the trophy property when he wanted it, it's like when the Disney executive bought over it. Oh, right. I think that was Ovitz had bought a property that, you know, his partner coveted and, you know, I just led to a lot of bad feelings. It's like rich people games. But anyway, there's that. And then number two, Beniof wants to experience the peak lifestyle of being the CEO of and founder.

And he wants a working class founder. Your job is not to go to Davos if you're the co-CEO with Benio. It's his job to go to Davos. It's not your job to take credit. it's not your job to be in the limelight. Co-CEO number two with the founder, your job is to keep your head down and do all the grunt work

that the founder doesn't want. That's what happened here. Interesting. I think that is almost certainly accurate. So that happens. Lots of other executives have left in the past year. A time of turnover and transition for lots of people, but that's been happening.

And the stock is down almost 50% year to date. And as it happens, Salesforce could be running into some headwinds, which both I first and David Sacks have identified as this like maturation in the SaaS industry, right? I'm calling it. You did a great trick store. Yeah, you said there was Sass. What did you call it? Like Sass overload or. Sast duration.

Sast duration. Yeah, I think that was good. You should, that should have, that was a term that should have, we should have workshoped that a little bit and we should have made that stick. That's my, that's on me. I should have given you a little more props for that one. Sast duration, man. Sast duration. It's okay.

It's not too late because it's just starting. Whenever we're trying to coin a term, you just got to give me a slight DM and say, hey, just I need a little air cover here, J-Cal. Let's get this one to stick. Just like mine, you help me with the, this is the, what did I name this bubble, the speculative asset bubble?

The speculative asset bubble. It's the SAB. It's the SAB. You guys were really good about, hey, let's just keep branding that. So when we come up with a good term, we got to brand it, try to get it to catch on. Okay. Well, I think we're going to get our chance for all of 2023 because saturation is real.

And so and then- Explain saturation to people, please. So, sasteration, yes. So I wrote this long tweet thread about the idea that companies, which now has become, you know, we're all talking about this, companies are going to start cutting their SaaS subscriptions is the really basic part of it, right? Like I did my personal consumer level audit of how much crap. I subscribed to and was like, whoa, a lot of this overlaps. This is too much. And I talked to a potential

customer of a company I was interested in investing in who said, you know, I guess the question for me is like not, does it work? It's do I need another $30,000 a year subscription? And I thought, oh, crap, this is going to be a problem for all of these companies. And also, we BCs have flooded the zone with these companies. Sure. And so new ones coming into this kind of chop around SaaS are going to are going to hit some hit some problems and so then I ended it by saying everybody's saturation I said yes when you did unsubstrived on your personal side were there any subscription services to seize ahead for another story that were particularly hard to unsubscribe from which was the worst who you have any ones or they were all one-click

easy breezing it was no I think you know this is really dumb this is really really dumb. But I subscribe to, or was subscribe to Cinemax because I really like this crappy English action show called Strikeback. It's amazing. Strikeback is freaking awesome. And then I was like, I don't want to dump Skinnamax, which I do so call it that, even though I subscribed for strikeback. Literally, for people not watching, I was like, right? The eyebrow went right up. Okay, Molly, say more about your Skinner Max. I don't watch anything else on Skinner Max except for Strikeback, but I almost didn't want to let it go. I wanted to hoard it just in case I felt like watching strike back.

And then I was like, that is so stupid. Cancel. Also strike back? Fair enough. It's awesome. Looks pretty good to me. Oh, my God, it's so good. It's like spy shows.

Oh, it's so good. Love it. God, I'm going to have to read, freaking sign up for Skin and Max. So that was hard. That was hard. Everything else, though, like, I did not need that. Here is my best advice to founders. So this is just a little nugget I'm going to add here.

This is a little founder trick. There are credit cards that you can get. And that's what I want you to do. I want you to write on your credit card the 2022 card. Then I want you to get a 2023 card and a 2024 card. Or you could do this in six-month increments. And you just take a little Sharpie out. You write that on the card.

Then you put all your subscriptions, anything that's a SaaS subscription. This is your subscription card for 22, 23, and 24. Now, you cancel that card. Hard cancel it. Close it down. Shut it down. And these are three credit cards from three different companies so that there's no way of rolling over the charges. Smart.

And then every December 1st, or let's call that November 15th, you turn the card off. And if you are like castaway lost on an island, this SaaS companies will find you. They literally, this is how you can, if you can get rescued from an island. Because they'll literally find somebody who will show up at the island and be like, hey, your sales force, your slack is turned off. That's how dogged they are. Yeah. The joke didn't land, I guess. Anyway, there are also cards you can get.

I got it. I'm trying not to interrupt. You're on a roll. Yes. There are cards you can get that let you program the card. I'm not going to give any shoutouts to this particular ones, but startups use these cards all the time. And we use them internally because young employees, you know, they don't want to have to use their personal card. And they don't often use it anyway.

So we can give them a card with a, $50 a month limit. And if it cancels or something like that, if it bounces, no big deal. They say to the operations person, can you put it at 200? I have to do this on it. Great. But then we can also turn it to zero, turn it off. So the programmability of cards is like that. Now, the credit card companies are in cahoots with the subscription companies to screw you on getting rid of these subscriptions. So this is why you have to protect yourself. You just turn it off at the end of the year, because they'll contact you. And the person in the company who needs it will contact you say, hey, I went into my, you know, whatever, my, my, my, my iTunes storage account, whatever SaaS

subscription product you're using. New York Times, Wells Street, I say it doesn't work. I need it. So that's how you prove need is by turning off the payment. Please do this, everybody. I do it personally. I do it professionally at all the companies. The technique works.

Chef's Kiss. Continue with the Salesforce story. It's excellent. It's excellent. The holidays are almost here. Hanukkah just. started, Christmas, Kwanza, all of it's right around the corner. And for many of us, this is a really hard time to maintain good health. Everybody wants to cheat, right? Oh, I'm going to cheat. It's going to be

my cheat day, my cheat week, my cheat vacation, enough of the cheating. And you know what the secret to surviving the holidays is? It's having a well-balanced gut. And that's why you need to check out my favorite product, SuperGut. This is my bestie David Freeberg's company. You know the Sultan of Science. SuperGut is a breakthrough nutrition company in the gut health health space. And I love their chocolate brownie bar. And the mocha mix, I put that in my coffee and I do a mocha squared. It's delicious. You know, a lot of these things taste terrible. But the Sultan of Science, David Friedberg, made it taste great. You see how then I got, I dropped 30 pounds. Supergut was a major part of that. And they have an unflavored fiber mix that I add to everything.

You just have a warm beverage. You put a scoop of it in. You're good. You don't even taste it. And then you got proper health. It improves digestion. It boost energy. It curves your cravings. And it's going to help you lose weight, which it did for me. If you're a found, you know how important it is to have great health, health as well. And it also helps your productivity.

They are running their best deal of the year right now. And if you use my code twist, you get an even better deal 30% off. Visit supergut.com and make sure to use the promo code twist. So my bestie Freiburg knows that it came from this podcast and you'll save 30%. All right. I was talking about Sastoration and then SACS came along and specifically started tweeting about Salesforce in this exact context. Saw net new ARR decreased by two thirds in the most recent quarter.

That's a huge slowdown, but implies the need to cut over $2 billion of sales and marketing if it wants to maintain CAQ payback at reasonable levels, i.e., you know, the customer cost, customer acquisition costs. And then he points out that over time, this could become a vicious cycle. Layoffs lead to seek contraction, lead to sales slowdown, to cost cutting, lead to layoffs, and repeat, aka sasturation ends up in a death spiral. The death spiral.

The SaaS spiral. Yeah. SaaS spiral for all these companies. Okay. There's. Yes. So it is into, it is in this context that Salesforce CEO, Mark Benioff appears to all of a sudden, having lost 21 executives who were probably managing lots of people,

right. is looking deeply at Salesforce employee productivity. Employees at Salesforce have doubled since 2019, doubled, as 73,000 employees up over 20% year over year. On Friday, Benioff led employees know over Slack that the newest hires weren't productive enough. According to CNBC, the message said, quote, new employees hired during the pandemic in 2021 and 2022 are especially facing much lower productivity. Is this a reflection of our office policy?

Are we not building tribal knowledge with new employees without an office culture? Are our managers not directly addressing productivity with their teams? Are we not investing enough time into our new employees? Do managers focus enough time and energy on onboarding new employees and achieving productivity? Is coming in as a new employee to Salesforce too overwhelming asking for a friend? And he added a halo smile at the end. Now, you were kind of west, shuffing at it?

I'm chuckling. I'm eye rolling a little bit? I'm eye rolling a little bit. Okay, because I, you know, coming from where I'm coming from, I thought those are good questions. I like the fact that he's asking it open-ended in the Slack and being transparent and having an open discourse with the employees. So as a manager, and I think maybe in our dynamic, Molly, which has made this show stronger and made us go up the rankings, sometimes I represent the manager class and sometimes you represent the worker class. Yeah, I'm like the populist. Yeah, I'm the populist in the building, I think.

So here, let's just embrace the dynamic. We'll play it out. Exactly. We'll play it out. I looked at it and I said, you know what? Before he does his riff, which he's going to do, he's saying, hey, here are my concerns as the manager. And the way he said it wasn't, I'm dictating to, you cogs in the wheel.

He's saying really thoughtful questions. Like, are we overwhelming them? Where's the tribal knowledge? Are the managers not doing enough? you know, what's not working here? And he actually put a little bit of a joke into it, to create a little levity here. It's a serious topic, but he said asking for a friend.

I like it. I give that. And listen, I'm, you know, I like Beningoff, but I'm not a simp or anything. I barely know the guy. I've asked him to come on the show no less than 10 times. And Benny Off has never come on the show. One time Benny Off came and spoke at our events and then didn't let me interview him.

He had selected his interview. It's the one time in the history of my events that I let somebody do it. And I regret it to this day. But I wanted to have Benny Off at the show. I needed him at the show because he's a headliner. It was very popular at the time. And I felt like his PR people were a little heavy handed with me, if I'm being honest. And they're like, you can have Benny Off, but we pick the interviewer.

And I'm like, it's my show. And I was really, I'm going to be honest about it right now because I know this is going to get back to Benioff. I was a little insulted by because I really wanted to discuss Benioff's career with him. Yeah. And I felt a little bit like they ate. twisted my arm. So that's the context of which I'm coming at this. I'm not like a Benioff apologist.

I'm not a Bennyoff critic. I like Benioff. I respect his career. And I think it's a cool dude in many ways in terms of his philosophy of running companies. I give him an A plus on this. Because the easier thing to do is to just be like, y'all aren't working hard enough.

Here's the Rift. Or just here's the Rift, whatever. But you were a little bit like a, so what's the thing about? I know, it's true. And maybe I was excessively a. because it's okay. I mean, it's a tough. The part, okay, well, I will say that I'll just answer the question.

The part that I was, uh, about was, is one, yes, you're asking open-ended questions, but you're opening the conversation by saying that employees are not productive enough. Now, so you've already kind of implied, I don't think you're all working hard enough. Right. I don't know what the metric for determining that is. Like, you know, I think if you're going to, if you're going to basically say, our new employees that we hired during the pandemic suck, then I would hope that one, there would be some metric attached to that.

Like, how did you determine that they're not productive? Is it that you can't see the work that they're doing? Like, what is the, what is the way that you are judging these new employees to be less productive? And how have you determined this? Because that's a pretty broad statement that's already going to set people back on their heels. If you're the populist class here, if you're the employee class, you're going to see that and be like, why ask the questions you might as well just fire me, right? You already said.

And so then when you end that with asking for a friend, it's like, bro, just own it. Like if what you want to know is why are you guys not working harder than one, as a manager, own it. Like I thought that that was a weird little passive aggressive way to end it. Okay. Sure, because he does say here, new employees hired during the pandemic in 2021 are especially facing much lower productivity. And then he gets in like, is that a reflection or a policy? He's trying to have that open end of discussion. But you're right. He doesn't say how that metric is, you know, determined. Now, we don't have, maybe they have some metric internal we're not aware of. Right. You know, and there's like a review system, but. Maybe, but it's a big, bad statement. And then don't make a little joke at it at the end. Like, you just put everybody who is hired.

Right. You just put everybody hired during the pandemic on notice that they're most likely going to get laid off. You've lost 21. And when you're losing 21 executives, that's you. Right? Like lower level people, they quit because of their bosses. But when all of their bosses quit, the ones who report to Benioff or somebody above him and you just lost that many people at that level. Yeah. Like then I would expect those open-ended questions to also include, what can I be doing better? That's what every. Every CEO should always be asking because they're the top of the pile. Right. And he says that. He says, is this a reflection of our office policy? Are we not building tribal knowledge? Are our managers not directly addressing productivity with their teams? So he does point out management too.

But I think, you should say, what could I be doing? Right? Like, if you're the CEO, I would have included that. Yes. I would have included that. Yeah. As CEO, that would have been a better ending than asking for a friend. Asking for a friend, I think is really condescending.

I actually found that like really. I took it as a joke putting. Yeah. I took it as a joke, but again, I'm representing the managerial founder. I'm representing the founder class. So I took it as a joke, but I think you representing the worker class in this dynamic make a good point. Because it's their jobs. It's serious business.

This is how they feed their families. Not everybody's, you know, the rich founder who's in control. You're not in control as a worker except to quit, right? You don't have as much control as the CEO. The CEO should have ended this. If I was going to edit this for Mr. Benioff, I would have said Mr. Benioff, how about ending instead of with asking for a friend?

Most of all, this rests on my shoulders. Are there things that I could be doing better? Yeah. Here's the anonymous tip line where you can give guaranteed anonymous feedback. Yeah. Boom. Use a burner account from this burner email system to email this account. And you literally give them a link to one of those burner.

emails. There's like burner emails you can use like for two-factor authentication. It's like a 10-minute email account when you don't want to give your email before Apple had the protection. I would literally link to that. That's like a power move. Here's my email address. And here's how to send a burner email to me.

Let it rip. You know, tell Mark the truth at Salesforce.com. Like what a powerful way to do it. And they'd be like, you know what? You're not in the office. You're in Hawaii. You know, who are you to tell us? Like you might get some really candid feedback, right?

You might. You might. Yeah. I just, there's something bigger going on here. There's, but also exactly. That is the other reason I was chuckling is that there,

you know, it's like it's less about this specific message, which did get my hackles up from, you know, the populist perspective. But also, yep, there is clearly like,

this is a CEO facing business headwinds that arguably Salesforce specifically has never faced. And so something is going on. So then to send a message. that's like, y'all are not pulling your weight. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you seem to be driving executives out of the building at an alarming rate.

So, like, what's the deal? Well, we can contrast here. Worker slash management class. Now, in our dynamic, it's, you know, appears here on the show. But I also did a version of this where I said, listen, everybody, here's reality. 2023 is going to suck.

I need everybody, including myself, to work harder and be more productive so we can get through this without layoffs. And layoffs are a possibility always, of course. It goes without saying. So I said, okay, I'm going to ask people for that, but I'm also going to make the commitment. Here are my new hours. And I told my assistant, and I told Mike Savino, our president, 8.30 a.m. to 8.30 p.m. And if there's any weekend meetings that I don't catch up on, just put them on Sunday mornings because my kids are out in Sunday morning. And I, you know,

you got to walk the walk if you're going to talk the talk. And so I just said, and I said it to both companies. You know, cards on the table. We have two. I have Insight.com. I got the launch company. I've got this weekend service me. All of its advertising base. And we know advertising is going to get crushed next year. I built the companies with plenty of room for profitability and plenty of runway, but I'm not in control of this. So therefore, let's all work harder. And I think, I don't know, you can give me a letter great here live on the air. But what I got back from the team, you individually and others, was how can I help? What can we do? let's have that espree de corpse.

Let's all do this together. I got that from my inside team. I got it from my launch team universally. And I think you just have to start with looking in the mirror. And I looked at the mirror, okay, what did I do right? I kept the company small. I kept the company profitable. I kept the cash reserves up.

That's why I'm not in a full bomb panic right now. But I looked at individuals productivity. I said, you know what? I gave this, you know, everybody the start of day, end of day, just, you know, self-reported as a remote company. But I never did timeboxing. I never, or blocking, whatever people call it. I never gave people any training on being ruthless about their time.

And when people did share their calendars for me, I looked at it and I was like, holy shit. Sorry about that. Holy cow. Yeah. I didn't give the right priorities to some people. That's what I found. Yeah.

I was like, I have people doing grunt work who are getting paid three times the salary of the people who should be doing this grunt task work. Let's call it task work. I don't want to be a something. But there are task work. It's okay. I'm all adults here. There's some things that are tasks that need to get done.

And that should be, you know, let's call it, you know, whatever, an entry level employee, not a senior level employee. And I looked at senior level employees. I was like, wait a second. Task, task work. Get that the heck off your plate. These are the things that are going to drive revenue. That's on me.

I didn't set the priorities enough. But things were going up until the right. I don't want to be micromanaging people. I want to be on those slopes behind me. I don't want to review a risk calendar. But you know what? Here we are. I need every hour of every soldiers, of every general, of every captain.

I need every hour perfect. No wasted time. That goes for me too. What am I spending my time on? Right. And am I spending my time in the right place? So I just looked at everybody. You, other manager directors, associates, researchers, at inside salespeople, writers.

And I just said, whoa, let's work together to be 20% more efficient. All of us can be 20% more efficient. doesn't mean adding two hours to the day. If you're working 10 hours, it doesn't mean work 12. Keep the 10, make them 20% more efficient. Also appreciate the extra half hour if you got it.

So anyway, I like to think I did, I don't know, rate me. One to 10. How did I do? I mean, it's uncomfortable for you to write me. Yeah. We're on my no eights.

Well, I'm going to give you a half or eight and a half. By the way, I have spread no eights throughout the entire family and everyone is obsessed with this concept now. Yes, thank you. It started with my son. Now he's telling everybody. Everyone's trying to figure out how to cheat. The cowards rating.

He told me that my seven and a half was a cheat. It's a, it's, it's sweeping the nation. I was like, no, what was it? No, eight. I'm going to give you a nine and a half and I'm going to say the only, the half is only for the moments in which, and this is what I felt with the Benioff thing, too. Yep. For the moments in which already productive employees felt that they were being told that they were unproductive. Got it.

Because maybe they were, maybe they were spending too much time on the wrong thing. but ultimately that was a leadership question, right? So I think anytime, I mean, people who went home to work, like everybody's like, oh, if you're remote added hours to their days. Everybody added hours to their days because the commutes went away. And so people work longer hours. Yep. Lots of people felt like, oh, crap, I'm doing this.

Like, my electricity bill went up. I, you know, had to buy a bunch of stuff for my house. I don't. And then on top of that, like a lot of management didn't change. They didn't block. The way that people were managed didn't change. Yes. So then to receive a message that's like,

you're not being productive enough. That's a bummer. Demotivating, let's say. You know I've been on a health kick over the past year. And part of that health kick is the greatest fitness app in the world, FitBod. And if you're listening to me right now, you probably care about optimization, right?

Saving time, doing things perfectly, and data-driven solutions. You know what? Fitness hasn't had these things until FitBod. FitBod is a data-driven workout app. It blends machine learning with exercise science. They create a custom dynamic program for you based on your fitness goals, based on your experience, and think about this, your available equipment, right? Maybe you're in a hotel, maybe you're at an Airbnb, maybe you're out of blue ground, and you need to use the equipment you have.

They're going to maximize your fitness gains by varying the intensity and the volume between sessions as well. And they make these beautiful visualizations of your body and how utilized your muscle. are. So let's check out this demo. Let's say I want to get a 30 minute workout in. And I want to work on my chest, triceps, and my abs. But I'm staying at some, you know, rental. And there's no equipment. Well, they'll create a perfectly optimized workout based on those parameters. Let's say I'm in another, you know, hotel, and they got a bunch of kettlebells where you go to another location and you got those pulley machines. They're going to make a perfect workout for you. It's amazing. It is one of the most beautiful apps ever made. They get featured by Apple all the time. Fitbod takes the guest

work out of fitness, just open the app and start making progress. Get 25% off your FitBod subscription or try out the app for free when you sign up now at FitBOD.m.com.com slash twist. That's F-I-T-B-O-D. dot M-E-S-T-T-T-FIST for 25% off. Yeah, that's a problem with management is you know, you're trying to communicate to the entire team. Now think about doing it with thousands of employees. You're trying to craft a message. Yeah. In his case, to tens of thousands of employees. Yeah. But there are 10,000 who are in bucket A, thousand in bucket B and 10,000 in bucket C. And how does one as a manager,

I don't have the answer to this, craft a message to high performers, low performers, and average performers. Right. It's kind of hard. Well, you use your managers. I guess you could instead of, but then people would do that, you know,

I want to hear from the CEO. Then as the CEO, you say, I want you to know, I have instructed every senior manager at the company. We're going to be doing this time review. We all have to go through this together. You know, we're going to be looking at strategies and training.

and making sure that our institutional knowledge is spent, and we can do this and whatever. And you're, because at that, when you're managing, we got 73,000 employees, you're the chief cheerleader. Got it. Okay. So the punch up just took, because I love to talk about exact language. One of the gifts I have is language.

It's one of the few. And I always try to actually workshop with founders. It's one of the things I do on board as a company. I literally somebody said, I'm having a problem with X, Y, and Z. I said, well, how are you going to say that? to that person. He's like, that's why I'm calling you, JCal. And I said, here's how I would say it. And then I said, hold on. Let me say it one more time. He's a little bit founder's system. This is like a very significant company. Can I record this? I was like, by all means. And I just

workshop back and forth. I literally role play with him. And I said, I really appreciate the feedback. I think it's incredibly thoughtful. Here's what I'm seeing on the ground inside the company. Here's how your feedback relates to that. And I think a possible way forward based on what I'm seeing with ground truth and what you know from your wisdom from being in the industry for 30 years, would the best solution going forward be for me to give you weekly reports on this data, and then for us to debrief weekly, monthly, quarterly, what do you think would work best? And it was like, he was like, oh my God, how come I don't know how to say that? And I was like, whatever.

I just don't, don't. So here's what Benioff could have added. Obviously, I'm speaking in general terms here about the overall productivity. the company, I would like managers to take responsibility for the productivity of their teams. And obviously, you should talk to your manager because there are some people here who are wildly productive and this doesn't apply to. And then there are people who are struggling. And they might be struggling because of their own personal effort, professional development, their manager not doing a great job, or in all likelihood, some combination of those three things.

So just workshopping it, that's the unlock. He's not blaming people. Yeah. It's just setting reality. And remember I told you, Warren Benis told me on this very program, we have to pull the episode number. Warren Benis is a management consultant who I was very taken by when I used to do interviews live. Somebody had just tipped me off that lived in L.A. And he's passed away right now, but he was really great. And he said to me, something that's stuck with me forever. One of the best piece of advice. He said, Jason, what leaders do is they define reality.

He got this from being in the war. He said, you got to define reality first. Whoa. When you define reality, then everybody can accept the reality and then work forward to solve. of whatever challenges you might have. Now, that could be you're on a foxhole and you're surrounded and the 10 people in your platoon are not making it out,

but maybe two could make it out. Maybe three could make it out and tell the story. I mean, this is heavy stuff, right? But the reality is we're surrounded, we're out of ammunition. We're either going to have to surrender and be tortured or we're going to fight our way, blast our way out, and two or three of us might make it.

Or none of us are going to make it. Okay, now we all accept that reality. Let's fight our way out, right? Hand solo, never tell me the odds. I want to ask you about one thing embedded in here. And this is a serious, important conversation that Silicon Valley has to have. Are we not for people who are first-time employees?

Not just like, you know, it's their fifth job, but first job out of college, let's say. Should they be working at home? Or should they be in an office with deliberate professional development management mentorship? Because he's saying, like, it's really hard to like become a sales force employee here. Yeah.

Now, we had a lot. It's a very emotional remote work because people feel like I finally have the freedom and flexibility I want. You feel that way. I feel that way. But management's like, wait a second. So is that valid Molly representing the worker class? Go ahead.

Union leader. Here we go. She's like, why do you pay you at the union leader? We should embrace it. People are on Twitter. Molly's too far left. J-Cow's capitalist menace to society. Molly's a woke left.

We're going to embrace it. Let's go. We're just leaning in. I don't have any nuance. I never had any nuance. I'm just kidding. God forbid there be any nuance. Molly and J-Cal have to be any other side.

Saxon and J-Cowl can have no overlapping. To the death. To the death. Go ahead. I do 100% think that. Like I think that it is great for... I mean, and... Oh, here it is.

And I don't know that every company is going to be able to create that opportunity, right? Like some companies have gone remote first. I think that what we're going to find is some, like, look, if you're, there's no question that remote work, I think, reduces your sense of connection to the place that you work in. I think it reduces your kind of overall connection. A spree to corpse. And espreed a corpse, absolutely. Like, you just don't feel the same trust and loyalty at a company.

I mean, I felt deeply connected to and committed to and loyal to Marketplace to a point because I had never worked in that office. There were people, like when I left Marketplace, I was like sad to leave, of course. And there were like three people I was sorry not to work with, but a lot of people worked there who I had never met because I had never been in the office in L.A. It was. You did say to me, I want to honor my contract. I want to do the right thing for Kyle. And I respected that. I said, okay, whatever time, I mean, I want Molly Wood as my co-host.

The timeline is the timeline. I'm not going anywhere. If it takes me a year or two to get you as the co-host on the show, I'll wait. I'm not in a rush. I want the best, you're the best guitar player. You know, I'm a lead guitarist and you can play rhythm perfectly with me, and then you can also play a little lead. That's great. Yeah.

I got no ego about it. If I can get you in six months or 18, and it took, I think, 24 or 18, I was like, I'll wait. I looked. I'll be honest with you while I was waiting for you. I was still looking. Of course you were. I should. That's my due diligence.

And you know what I found? Nobody compared to you. There it is. Thanks, man. You can play the song right now. She's like heart. Thank you. I agree.

And here's the dynamic. You know, people like it. But I have been in the work world for a really long time. Right. I've been in the work world for a really long time. Right. If this were my first job ever. If I were like 20, 22.

Yes. I come into this place. I've never met the people that I work with ever. I'm alone in my apartment. Like for some. young people, remote work, is horrible because they're lonely and miserable and they don't have a good place to work and they can't afford the internet connection and their companies aren't helping them. And I think what we're likely to see, I just resist the idea of a mandate for every

company and every single young person. But like, yeah, fundamentally, if you're not, if you're going to have a remote first workplace, then you have to figure out, especially with those young people, how to get them together a lot. They need to bond. I mean, I've seen producer Rachel's apartment on this camera. It's not pleasant. I know, poor thing. It's a rough place to work out of every day. She lives in a tiny little apartment.

There's always like police guards going by. Yes, exactly. It's crazy. I mean, listen, I trust me, I used to hang on the L. Well, I'm not going to, I don't want a doctor, but, you know, I used to hang in Manhattan. Yeah. Let me give the official answer here. Slap.

You nailed it. Management and the worker class as represented by J. Call and Molly. Woja? No, no. Not ever. No. Young workers, first-time workers, should be in the office. Whether it's five days a week or three, we can split hairs.

And they want to be. I'll be totally honest. I don't think they want to be at home. It's not good for their psychology. Even I want to drive some absurd amount of time and space to an office once a week. Like, you feel better about the people you work with. Correct. You build more fabric.

Now, I'm making an announcement here. I think. If we're on a high-wring freeze right now, but I think for new positions for my venture firm, not speaking for Insight here, I'm going to make all new positions in the office. I'm thinking about it.

I'm not going to make people who are not in the office. But if I hire, let's say, let's say things go particularly well raising launch fund for. Meetings have been going, we got all the accredited slots. We had $45 million in demand early. And now I'm going to meet with the big LPs.

I did two meetings. It went incredible. I think I'm feeling pretty good about it. If I have to hire a couple more associates, I think it's going to be associates. You've got to be in the office. And Jake, I was going to show up a couple days a week and sit with you. And if that's appealing to you, then move your ass to San Francisco or wherever I put the office.

We keep the existing San Francisco office or whatever. I just, I've been thinking about it. I'm not going to drag you and the other people in. You guys, at your leisure, if you want to come in, I'll be there at these hours. We could wrap out. We could have like the investment team meetings, let's say, in person, maybe. Who knows? So great.

So that's what I believe is going to have. happen as we go into the recession because there's another dynamic here. Booming market. Remember the booming market? It was so, it was such a short time ago, too. It was like five minutes ago. Feels like it's 10 years ago. Remember when anything was possible and all the companies were going to be unicorns?

In the summer? Like a year ago. We were literally sweet. I was sitting here with the slopes behind me. And I just started skiing up my brand new ski house and the world was my oyster. and I wasn't living in complete chaos 12 months ago. And literally 12 months ago,

you were like, I'm skiing every afternoon. I'm gonna like, I'm gonna enjoy my, now you're like 8.30 to 8.30. And on Sundays, twice on Sundays. I was talking with my spouse.

She's like, how you doing, buddy? And I'm like, not good. Yeah. This is really depressing for me. I don't, you know, me,

I don't get depressed, but I was having like a little pity party over the weekend. I was like, oh my Lord, all my company's going out of business, all these companies making cuts, me having to look at companies

and say, what's the plan if I have to, make cuts. This is, you know, it's, it's heavy. And I, you know, I take it very personal, very emotional person. I have a lot of empathy. And so like when founders call me and they're, you know, upset or they're down, it's just like I am like, um, the tenant, who is on Star Trek, the next generation, the empath. Yeah, Dana Troy. Troy. I'm like her. I like literally, their sadness goes inside of me and I feel it. And so I was just having like that little like moment of like, oh, God, I feel so bad for my founders who are laying.

people often who are, and they're scared. And, you know, I just, it all, just all that emotion goes inside of me. A booming market, the power tilts to the employees, right? And it's been like that for 10 years. We've had this discussion. Yeah. Then COVID happens. Well, you know what?

Employees gained even more power. And then, this is all a two-year period of time. I know. Then a recession, employees lose all power. Mm-hmm. All power. You, unless you are top five or 10 percent, it's over. hours now swung the other way.

Let's just call it what it is. So now, you know, all these white collar, this is the white collar recession. It's not a blue collar recession. Blue collar workers are getting paid more and more and the jobs are not filled. Everybody needs more waiters. Everybody needs more housekeepers. Everybody needs more, you know, plumbers, which is kind of an electricians. Oh my God, electricians.

Those jobs, they can't fill. These are jobs that pay six figures for manual labor and they can't fix them. They can't fill them. Plumbers, look up average plumber salaries. In some cases, like Cidious, it's 100, 200K. I mean, it's a f*** job. Anyway, putting that aside, thank you. Thank you, everybody.

That one landed. Now the recession has tilted. Any young person in the workforce is going to be going to an office. I hate to tell you, that's it. Yeah. And you know what? It's going to be good for you. Go to the office.

I did it my whole career. You're going to learn a lot. It's going to suck to commute. But just lean into it and embrace it. And then the new standard, I believe, will be like the old standard, which is be a high performer, earn the right to make your own hours, earn the right to work from home. That's where the pendulum will land. You know what? That makes perfect sense, too, because the people who, I mean, what you're describing is a one is potentially a wonderful work life where when you're young and you're meeting your spouse and you want.

to be social and you need to connect with a workplace in order to learn and get the chance to impress the boss, like, and you've got all the energy and you can commute or you're living right there in the city like that is exactly when you can and should be in the office and it will enrich you and benefit you and be incredible. And then when you have kids and you need a little more flexibility because you might have a doctor's appointment or you did, but you also want the option to like get the hell away from your children and your dogs and go to the office two days a week. and you've earned that trust.

Like, that honestly is kind of the perfect. And we had it unofficially. Yes. It was a wink. We've had it for decades. It was like, wait a second. That, you know, CEO, that senior VP, they can't have that many vacation days. And it's like, well.

Or they hardly come into the office. And it's like, yeah, where they were like leaving early long lunch. It's like, well, did you see their book of business as the top salesperson? Did you see the creativity and how the product is designed? for that product manager. It's like, you know what? And that coder is four times more, you know, it's one of those 10x coders. Okay, it's a 10x coder and they want to live, they want to spend more time in, you know,

Costa Rica, like, you're not firing them because, you know, at three in the morning, you get the code commit that solved all the problems that nobody else in the company could. Right. Freedom, performance. Freedom comes from performance. How are we? That's where this ends. Now, let's go back to Salesforce and then we wrap on Salesforce.

If you built. the largest building, Molly, in San Francisco. Mm-hmm. That you can see from Marin to SFO. Mm-hmm. Oh, there she is, yeah. Oh, yeah, this is, I mean, this is like the pharaoh building the greatest pyramid. It is.

That is a temple to your greatness. To your greatness, Mark Benioff, with the top floor, floors being the ohana, Am I pronouncing that correctly? Ohana. Ohana something space. Yeah. I've been there. You've been to the Ohana space at Salesforce?

I think I went to one party there when it first opened. It is like nothing you've seen in your life. It's two floors of event space with stairs between them, vaulted ceilings, that look out on the bay. And this, there is no Google Salesforce tower. There is no, well, there is the Apple campus. This is what pharaohs do. This is what kings do. Kings built castles, the pharaohs built, the pyramids, the elite executives build a temple, an object in the world for their disciples to come.

Now look at the Apple campus. Look at that beautiful ring. We'll pull that up next. Then look at Facebook's Geary designed a building in East Palo Alto with the walking roof. Totally. Imagine you as the pharaoh or queen. Imagine Molly being queen and you built that. Yeah. Look at that beautiful. Now, imagine you're Cleopatra and you build that.

Imagine you're the great pharaoh and you built that. The Taj Mahal. And nobody goes there. Nobody goes there. And it's crickets. What does that do to the psyche of that person? God. People are humans.

They are humans. Look at the Gehry building. that Zuckerberg build. I'll tell you what happens on the inside. When you get rich and powerful like this, he had tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars laying around, and you're like, what can I do

with these stacks of money? I can buy my shares back. Okay, whatever. Not particularly joyful to buy some shares back. Who cares? Like some numbers on a spreadsheet change. But when you meet with Frank Gehry,

where you meet with whoever the architect was, and they say, here's a possibility. And then here's another possibility. And then they got the secret possibility, the third option. They don't tell you, this is how the architects make the money. They give you the two options. And you're like, whoa, the pharaoh sits there. And then the architects have this.

But this, you know, you said $2 billion and this is five. But this is, you know, if like, you know. This is what the real pharaoh would do. This is like we start with like something insane. And then, of course, we get pragmatic. And you get the person. the end. One more time.

Tell me more. And then all of a sudden, you know, whether it's in Qatar where they built all these incredible stadiums for the World Cup, whether it's,

you know, Benny off at this tower or Steve Jobs with, you know, he didn't, I don't know that he lived to see it, you know,

the campus, uh, or Zuckerberg, whoever it is. Mm-hmm. It's their Taj Mahal. It's psychologically, even if they admit it or not,

psychologically, it grinds you, that you built the temple and the temple is empty. And they want people to come to the temple and they want them to learn the religion. And this is at the core of this debate. And you know what?

All the young disciples, you're going to come to the church. You're going to go to church. You're coming to the temple. Or you're not going to work for the next two or three years until the cycle starts to do. And in phase three or four of the cycle will be back to you getting to pick what you want.

But for now, you're lucky. I've been talking to some people out there about jobs. And they're like, I got six months. And then some of the people got laid off three months ago, they're like, got three months and they're out there looking for jobs. Not looking good for white collar. That's grim.

You read any anecdotal stories? Yes. Well, because I know all those people in media. Yeah. I mean, the media are screwed. The media people are screwed. It's just a slaughter. Everybody's like, I hope I can monetize my substack.

Like, it's a, it's tough. I think of love with that. Yeah, it's, it's going to be. brutal for a while. Mollywood.substack.com. Uh-huh. Oh, and here is the Gehry, the greatest architect, one of the greatest architects of our time.

I am pay, I guess is the other one. Yeah. But like, I mean, imagine you build something like this, you know, when people are walking around the rooftop. Look at that rooftop. I mean, it's literally like take the 10 greatest hotels in the world

and whatever they accomplished, and then 10x that, and that's where you go to work. And now nobody's there. Right. And it's empty. You know, and you're spending literally $1,000 a day maintaining the plants on the roof. I guarantee you it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to maintain that building.

Oh, I'm sure. I'm not counting on without a doubt. I'm talking about maintenance of plants and cleaning furniture. Nobody shows up. Yeah. And it's so interesting because that is why, like when one of the things that Benioff was really upset about was that this leaked, that this memo was leaked. And he was like, what? And the thing is that all of that,

all of that is the stuff that starts to happen more and more and more. Like you never used to hear a peep out of Apple. You never would Facebook employees did not leak. They loved it there. Loved working there. And again, when you all leave, you're not part of the cult. You don't go and get indoctrinated. You don't go and take that stroll on that beautiful rooftop.

You lose the connection a little bit. You start to disconnect. You feel less loyal. You're like, I don't like the way they're talking. treating me like it's a I think that I surprisingly agree with you. It's not even that surprising. I mean, I 100% agree with you that people feel better when they go to offices. And also there are going to be some companies who can like and also work has changed forever.

So some companies will continue to use it as a differentiator to say you can always be remote and people, there will be choices and that management will have to over time adjust and adapt. to how to manage a remote workforce. And that conversation needs to be happening in equal and opposite and equal impact. You know what? The underlying tension here is the commute. The reason why Cios are oblivious to this

is because they pick where the office is and they can afford to live near it. So if you're Benny Off and you live, I don't want to docks him, but I think it's public knowledge. He lives somewhere in San Francisco and his driver can get him to the office in 15 minutes.

He's like, what's the issue? But now if you're coming from the East Bay, and you've got to get on Bart and you've got to be accosted by some mentally ill person who's on fentanyl. You're like, here's the issue. I got to get on Bart and it smells like urine and, you know, I got to stand for 45 minutes

and it breaks down every other day. Like, there is a direct correlation between depression, domestic violence, suicide, anxiety, and commute length. And it turns out the ideal commute length is like 20, 30 minutes. After that, it becomes oppressive. Our office, you know, I can get to, even I live far away from it, but I can get to it in, you know, similar amount of time.

I don't feel depression about it. But now if you had to go 90 minutes, I'd be like, well, F this. So you could solve the whole problem if people can e-bike to work. That's all. They just got to be able to get to work on an e-bike or a car in 15 to 30 minutes, 40 max. This would not be an issue if housing was probably. And what should happen next is this. These kingdoms, these temples that are built, should come with the requirement that you build housing next to it.

And all of these nimbie people need to stop their nonsense. And when Apple builds that big round circular campus, they should be allowed to build two towers next to it of employee housing that they control, that is theirs. And if they want to have 5,000 people come to a location, they should be required to have 10% of that in employee towers near it. that's at a discount or just whatever at cost. And that may seem creepy to people. But for a young person, when they go to college, college provides housing. Why wouldn't Google and Facebook and Apple and Salesforce be able to say, hey, we're building this giant building?

We want to build a dormitory next to it, aka an apartment building. And if young people want it, their studio is one bedroom. It's not for families. We're not replacing housing. We're taking a little pressure cooker off. You know, like the little, when you do the hot pot, the little soft, the little steam comes at the top, you have the little pressure cookie

so I don't blow up. Yeah. That would be amazing. Then you got 500 or 5,000 people going to the campus. The young folks are like, oh, I can walk. Right.

I can e-bike and I'm at work. They might very much like it. You might add some other housing in the community. Like, why not? No, but like young people will, right? Young people who do this common sense. Huge amount of task work that takes hours and hours and hours

as opposed to like brain work, right, the intellectual work that executives do that can occur while they're doing the dishes. Like there's just different kinds of work. There are different kinds of modalities. The sooner we realize that, the more we can optimize

for the right employee at the right time. I heard some thing go by my feed that like chat CBT is making $200 billion a year. Apparently. I don't know. So evidently, it's free for consumers. Are people licensing it or is that all from Microsoft? Can you explain this to us?

So what's super hilarious is we were like, Wait a second. So this headline goes by that says that Open AI, which is the startup, of course, that makes Chad GPT, is projecting $200 million in revenue next year and a billion dollars in revenue by 2024. And then I immediately told producers, was like, you got to like show us how and the heck that's going to happen. Because Open AI right now is a research organization. It was a non-profit. It was a nonprofit. It crossed a million. So, it was a nonprofit. It crossed a million. then they released chat GPT and it went insane. Everybody knows about this. Like at every level of society, it's so freaking fascinating. It crossed a million users just five days after it launched. Sam Altman was asked if it would always be free.

And he said, we will have to monetize it somehow at some point that compute costs are eye-watering. And even though it had basically no plan to make money, it was valued at $20 billion. So according to the OpenAI website, we did do a little digging. It charges developers that license it. technology via API, cost about a penny to generate 20,000 words of text and about two cents to create an image from a written prompt. Reuters reported that in this pitch to investors, they're predicting this $200 million in revenue and then aiming for a billion in 2024. And that's where, to be honest, we don't know how they...

So, to make the IP fees, just like Amazon charges for compute power or Twilio charges for email and SMS cents. Makes total sense. It'll be a money printing machine. There will be competitive. As we said, Google needs to get their button gear. And Google and Sundar, Sundar should be staring at the ceiling. He should, his teeth should have all the enamel ground down on them. Because last week, we played a game, Molly. Called a Google search at GPT. Remember that?

Good times. Chat GPT worked. Everybody, this is storming the interwebs. everybody's saying Google search or chat GPT. Everybody wants to know if it was a fluke. So I asked the producers, can we do one more round of Google search or chat GPT? I just want to know if it's true or not because chat GPT won round one. So here we go.

Round two, Sundar, I wish you the best. But you got your ass handed to you in round one. And now it's Sam Altman versus Sundar in round two of Google Search. Chattipchee, take it away, Van White. Question number one. Who are the Olson sisters? Okay. I know the answer to this.

Okay. Here we go. Now, wait, you don't know the, you don't know. I have no idea. I have no idea. And so people know how we did this. We took the first or second result on Google. We copied and paste the text.

And then we compared it to the text given to us by chat GPT. So it's normalized. Molly has no idea. I have no idea. Because when you're doing a Google search, it's reasonable to say you're going to click on a link. That's the idea. Or maybe we took the one box,

but my producers here, our producers made it so we don't know. So here's the answer that we got from either chat GPT or Google. Mary Kate Olson and Ashley Fuller Olson, born June 13, 1986, also known as the Olson twins as a duo, are American fashion designers and former actresses.

The twins, made their acting debut as infants playing Michelle Tanner on the television series Full House in San Francisco. At the age of six, Mary Kate and Ashley began starring together in other TV shows, film, and video projects, which continued to their teenage years. Through their company, Dual Star,

the Olsons joined to the ranks of the wealthiest women in the entertainment industry at a young age. Okay, hold on. Now, this is either a chat GPT response or it is one of the first links on a Google search, That's been cut and paste, and we took all.

So we're just reading a straight text document here. Now, if I would read this, this feels awfully like a Wikipedia response. That's what it feels like to me. Yeah. Because I've been using Wikipedia since it came out. This feels Wikipedia-ish in terms of how they like to write stuff. But now we also know Chat ChpT was trained on Wikipedia. Everything.

Google search has had the benefit of putting the Wikipedia snapshots in Google for free because it's common use. It's got creative commons. And as long as you source it correctly. I'm going. This is a Wikipedia result. And I think it's a Google search result. What do you think, Molly?

I thought the same thing. I think this has Wikipedia written all over it. So it's a Google search result. I think it's a Google search result. Okay. So it's a Google search result. Correct. Okay, great.

Ding, ding, ding. We got one. We got one. So we're one for one. Now the question is, I guess, if we put this up against another way to play this game is not us guessing it

is to put the two there and say which one's better so for round three of chat GPT versus Google I want to put them side by side and pick which is better that'll be round three nice there is a toggle below

so we can look but we'll see all the other answers though okay so let's go through it and then we'll do that okay Molly we both got it right nailed it okay we're learning

we're learning the humans are learning alongside the AI Okay, here we go. Question number two. How can I start a podcast? Great prompt. Great prompt.

In our wheelhouse. Yep. All right. Answer. Maybe we should put this answer up because it's a lot of bullet points. But choose a topic. The first step in starting a podcast is to choose a topic that you are passionate about and that you think will be of interest to your audience.

Determine your format. Will it be an interview solo or co-hosted show? Choose a name and artwork. Give your podcast a catchy name and create some artwork to go with it. Set up your recording equipment. You will need some basic equipment to record your podcast, including your microphone recording software in a way to edit your audio. There are many options to choose from,

ranging from inexpensive to professional grade equipment. Record and edit your episodes. Once you have your equipment set up, it's time to start recording your episodes. You can do this by yourself or with a co-host or guest. Choose a hosting platform. In order to share your podcast with the world, you'll need to choose a hosting platform.

Yeah, you get it. And then promote your podcast. And then finally, It can be a lot of work, but with dedication and creativity, you can create a successful and engaging show that resonates with your audience. All right. I just want to say that this is so comprehensive. It really is. It's so good.

It's so thorough. It is so on point. It's exactly the right steps in exactly the right order. It's so good that I think a content farm answer that infected the top 10 results would not. be this good. Therefore, I believe this is, I believe this is chat GPT. And I'm a little scared right now because I'm starting to associate a comprehensive, thoughtful answer that's perfectly written as chat GPT. Right. And that's like, what's your break now? Take me through your process for your answer. I'm sorry I went first both times. You do the next two first.

I know I 100% agree. I'm so excited about the game. And it's also, I think the other dead giveaway is that it doesn't try to sell you anything. It's not smarmy. It's not smar me. It's just this, but it is encouraging. I feel like we're starting to get to know chat GPT a little bit. And it's language like this last thing where it's like, it can be a lot of work. But with dedication and a little bit of creativity, you can create a successful and engaging show that res chat GPT is like kind of encouraging.

Remember when we had it right the play about choosing the right major? and it was like, the important thing is that you find something that makes you happy and resonates with you. Like, it's a little gentle mom. And I think that's the giveaway for me here. What an insight from you, Molly. It encourages you. It's a tell. If you, if it's a chat bot, they designed the chat bot to make you feel better about being, about yourself.

Whereas Google search results are based on content, corporate content creation. And corporate content creation. content creation is not designed to make you feel good. It's designed to make you click and buy something. We have figured it out. It's about the dollar. Chat GPT doesn't want to sell you something. It wants to make you successful.

It has better intent. It's here to help. Just like all AI, how it always starts. All right, producers. No, it does not change producer, Nick, because they're going to make money through fees. Micro payments. Chat GPT is a micro payment processor.

And so it's going to be a subscription search engine. I'll tell you right now the business model. Chat GPT is going to partner with Google. I'll just tell you what's going to happen. Okay. After we get this answer, did we get it right or not? We did. Okay.

So right now Sundar, I have Google shares. I'm going to sell my Google. I'm making a J-trade right now. I'm going to make a J-trade right now. I'm going to get out of my Google shares if Google doesn't release a competitor in 100 days. I'm selling my Google shares

and I'm buying Microsoft shares because my understanding and I'm going to need my producers to tell us on tomorrow's show. This is an assignment. From now on we're doing assignments. For tomorrow's show or Wednesday's show, I want to know the relationship

between Microsoft search and OpenAI. I know this investments. I know all this other stuff. They're using Azure I understand as their cloud. I want to know if they have the exclusive right to search. I need somebody to either tell me or leak me, whatever, don't break any laws, but if somebody has information they want to give to the TWA startup or producers at this week in startups.com from an anonymous account, I think Microsoft Bing has the exclusive on this for search.

If that is the case, and if Microsoft, if Google and Sundar do not release something competitive in 100 days, I'm selling my shares in Google and I'm moving them to Microsoft. This could be the Google search killer. Now, that's going to be hard to happen. But you know what? There was a time when people thought Google was a toy and Yahoo Directory was the winner. And we all saw that movie and it happened faster and more violently than we thought. This is red alert for Google.

Google needs to fire a third of its employees until the other two there would skip back in the office and to make a competing product here. This should be an existential moment for Google. And I don't perceive them taking it serious enough. I agree. I think if you own Google shares right now, you need to have your finger on the sell button. I'm hovering over the sell button on my Google shares, and I'm hovering over the buy button. Mark 100 days from today, I want a 100-day clock producer Nick, remind us every 20 days or so to talk about this, and I'm going to make this straight in the next 100 days. I'm going to double my position in Microsoft and sell my position in Google.

Boom. Now tell us how chat GPS is going to make money. Very simple. You were on the verge, yes. Yes, it's very simple. Microsoft is going to make Bing search have this feature. Microsoft does not need to make money from their search engine. They need to get people into their ecosystem.

If this is integrated into the ecosystem, it keeps the Windows franchise going, it keeps the office franchise going. It increases the search results in Bing. they will figure out a way to make money from it just from having more users in their ecosystem, Microsoft, Games, Microsoft Office, Azure. This is going to grow those businesses. So in the same way, Google does not need to make money

from Google Office or Google Docs. What do they call the Google Suite? Google Suite's not what makes Google Money. Google Suite keeps you on Google's website, right? How do you get to Google Suite? You open up the Google Search. interface and you go to the top right hand box and you hit that little four thing

and it's got the icon for Google Docs, right? It keeps you in the Google ecosystem. You're using Chrome, right? It's just, you're using Chrome, you're using Google Docs, you're using Google presentations, and that makes you search more. What search will do at Bing is,

it'll make you, they'll have the little thing for Microsoft, for Xbox 360, for Minecraft, for Office, it'll make you use those more and those franchises. So you have one franchise that makes it through cloud computing and software, and the other one makes it through search and advertising. People hate advertising in certain contexts. I think in search, they like it.

But you can lose, Microsoft doesn't have the dependency Google does on ad revenue. So your margin is my opportunity. Also, the AI, I mean, we're just assuming that this is only good for search, right? This is still a massively powerful AI technology that can make all of its other products better. So the more it gets us using, we assume, right, none of the articles that have talked about Microsoft's investment have ever even mentioned Bing. And so it does make me wonder like if a tiny bit they haven't thought of that, which is kind of awesome because they are thinking about it now. But the idea of all of us. If it's not in there, Molly, it is now.

They may not be saying it because it's the most important part. Because it's the most important part, exactly. because all of us using Bing GPT trains Bing GPT to make every other Microsoft product better because they can embed this AI and all of a sudden your email writes itself and your cloud automatically optimizes for this, that, and like all whatever even magic AI can do, it all does as a result of us training it by using it for search. Can I give Sam Altman as flowers for a second?

Yeah. Sam Altman's brilliant. I mean, I know Sam personally, the kid's brilliant for two reasons. One, he flipped this to a for-profit. Number two, Sam Waltman is brilliant because he knows Google had the bet on DeepMind and they're doing no deal with Open AI.

And he said, who is their biggest rivalry and let me create a deep relationship with them? You don't need to make a relationship with the number one person. What you want to do is make a relationship with the person competing with the number one person.

He understood that. He's a pretty good poker player. So I think he knows how to manage risk and place bets. What a brilliant move historically for him to align open AI with Microsoft. Because they also have GitHub. And GitHub was a Y Combinator company. You remember Sam Watt was president of Y Combinator for a while. He then, GitHub uses Open AI for their co-pilot product.

You know, the thing that helps your right code. Yeah. man, Microsoft's going to buy Open AI or Open AI is going to just be a sister company or whatever. But Microsoft's like literally could be the company that runs the end. I mean, they just did such a silent turnaround. Like they went underground after the big antitrust thing. The Balmer years. Satya has come in and he is just the silent killer.

Like they're going to take over everything. And then also more flowers for Sam Alman who knows how to keep his own money in his pocket. Because did you also hear about how AI open? an AI has a profit cap to investors at a hundred. They can only do 100x or 20x. Yeah, something like that. And I was like, by the way, if you're pricing the thing at 20 billion, like, is it really going to become a trillion dollar company?

Like, it's kind of like me being like, you know what? I can't use that analogy. I was going to use a dating analogy. Sorry, I had to sign myself. It's like me being like, you can come to my restaurant, but you can only spend a thousand dollars on dinner per person. Right. And you're like, how do I do that?

It's a $300 pre-fix. You know, like you got three Michelin starts. How do I spend a thousand? You're like, nope, sorry. $1,000 per person. You're like, okay, I guess I have to buy a, you know, $700 worth of wine per person and get the white truffle supplement. I don't know.

It's like the greatest reverse psychology ever. It really is. You can only make 100 X. You're like, that's what I want to make. Never made 100 X. on a late stage investment. Well done, Sam Womben. Chess kiss to you.

Provo. Give them slow clap. All the flowers. All the flowers. Little Big Things is something that I wanted to do here based on a website. I want to give the website the websites.

Is the website Big Little Things.com or Little Big Things.com? It's the opposite. So we did the opposite here, even though we stole it from them. So we're doing Little Big Things, but if you were to go to, Little Big Details.

I love this. website, I visited every three or six months and I like an hour goes by. They just on this website, little big details.com, it's for a bunch of design geeks. And they point out little design things that are notable. We are doing little big things, not little big details. So we stole it from them to do this segment. Please don't sue us. But it's little things you and I find in the world or producer Rachel that we think are notable and fun and we want to give them a high five some flowers. What do we got this week? I know. And this week is one of these. I mean, this was like a stealth product appearance that took the world by storm. Instagram of all things rolled out a new

feature that I have not seen anywhere else, which one is crazy. It does not appear to be a direct ripoff. And all of a sudden, everybody seemed to find out about it and use it all at once. It's called notes, Instagram notes. And in your DM interface, which is, of course, where all the kids live, you can hit this little plus button and leave a little note for people. And they can respond. Like, I don't know that everybody immediately figured out it's sort of potentially a chat prompt, like chat GPT, but for humans who follow you.

But you just leave this cute little note. And all of a sudden, it was like, it appeared. everybody loved it, everybody's using it. I'm like, how did everyone know about this? And how did Instagram invent a new thing as opposed to stealing it from someone else?

I'm so confused. Well, it's basically a, it's basically a tweet, I think. That starts a private chat. But it is, I think, best described as a chat prompt because it's not public. Right.

And so there's Rachel. I have no thoughts, only vibes. You know, that's like a Gen Z thing, you know? Perfect. She's got that little Gen Z, melancholy and the infinite sadness, you know,

vibes. And you can look it up later, Rachel. It's one of the greatest albums of Gen Z's generation. Producer Brian says it's like Hinge the dating app. Ooh. I don't know. I've never been on Hinge either. Is that where they rip this off from?

Molly's a liar. She's been on Hinge. No, I'm a bumble girl. Oh. You just got a bunch of stands and Sips to download Bumble. You should get paid for that. No, no, no. That's why I use Bumble because only the woman can message.

Oh, sweet. Mm-hmm. Yeah, this is great. This is a great. little big thing for you to check out in your Instagram feed. If you have little big things you've noticed in products in the world, please email producers at this week in Startups.com. And if you'd like to make the jingle for this,

you might get yourself 15 minutes on Zoom with me, or $500 sent to your Amazon gift card, whatever you want. The end. All right, great show, everybody. Great show. All right. Okay. So, Molly, why does it matter that they're doing this? I mean, I think it matters because it's Instagram trying to take better advantage of its status as a communication platform.

That's my theory, because this only exists in your DM interface, which again, like a lot of olds, don't use Instagram for DM. But Gen Z's, my kid doesn't even text, right? All of his chats are in Instagram DM. And Instagram has been, I think, way behind. the curve in terms of getting broader awareness of its group chat capabilities. Like they're just getting trounced by iMessage and signal. And here they are, in fact, a pretty decent messaging platform that's built into the place you're already sharing with stories.

So I think they're trying to drive people and start those chats by actually giving you an ability to prompt those chats. So it's going to raise engagement. But Instagram is known as the superficial social network, images, stories, you know, Insta models, Insta girlfriends, Insta husbands, all this like everything is based on the photo. Right. Like, you know, the FOMO.

But here's a place where you could be more intimate, if I would use a word, or be more personal. And I have to say, when I was having my emo weekend, my pity party this weekend, I put a sad face. I know. And I put exhausted. I was like legitimately worried when it was my cry for help. I was being a whiny little.

Genzy. word you want to put as the third word. A whiny little B. A whiny little boy. That's right. A WLB. A whine a little boy. Okay.

No, Nick. No, J-Cal. You were allowed to have feelings and still be a strong, healthy human in the world. Okay, fine. Good God. I was feeling. I had a feeling it was pathetic.

I'm sorry. I don't need to be. You sound like my daughter now who thinks I'm a toxic male. I am. I'll put it out there. I have a little toxic masculinity. I'm of a certain gentleman. What's that?

Nick was doing it too. He's like snowflake. I was being a little, Snowflaking it. I was just like, and you know what I did? I did slope therapy. Four out of the last six days,

I got on the slope. I put in a Pink Floyd concert. I put in a dire straits concert. Then I put in infinite, I put in melancholy, and I started playing some like really good Billy Corrigan, and I just ripped it.

And I did work. whatever, four or five hours on the mountain alone. I'm back. I'm back to my toxic masculinity. The samurai armor's back up. Let's kick some ass. Sorry about the F-bomb. No more feelings ever again.

Let's kick some ass. I don't need emotions. And then I just replaced my sad face and my emo exhausted. And literally, it was so great, though, Molly. I had like 10 people immediately like, you're okay, buddy. You're okay, little boy. You okay, little boy. I was like, I need a hug.

I was like, hang in there, buddy. Hang in there, buddy. You got this. little buddy. I sent you a hang in there like a kitty. You did. You did.

Thank you for that. Everybody needs to hang in their little buddy. Everybody needs to hang in there little buddy. Yeah. So this is, I want to give the

Instagram team, their flowers today. It's flowers Monday. I can try to keep everything on a positive tip here. My Knicks are on a seven game winning streak. You will know my psychology

based upon my portfolio, based upon the ratings of the show, based upon the Knicks record, and how many hours I'm on the slope. I'm a simple person. I'm a simple person. You can decode. him. You can decode him. It's easy. You read me

like a book. Knicks on a seven-game win streak. Jake How's going to be upbeat. That's a good tip. That's a good tip. I'm going to put that in my whatever my stocks app is. We're in the sixth seed. Feels like we can beat any team in the East, but two, I'll take it. I'll take a first or second round exit as long as we put up a fight for my Knicks and I'll go to New York for it.

Molly, great job today on the show. Great show. Good Monday energy. Producers, good job. everybody's productivity. If I was going to rate one to ten, produces performance today with no eights, I give it a nine. Nice. Give it a solid nine.

If that jingle had been there, it would be nine and a half. And in my world, there's no tens. So I'm just giving you a tip. The best you're going to do with me is eight and a half, nine, nine and a half. And I'm giving today a nine. So kudos to the producers. If you had the damn jingle, you would have got a 9.5, which is perfect in J.Cal's book. I've never given myself a 10.

Okay? The journey's never done, everybody. All right, stay tuned for... By the way, at the end of the show here, the special announcement, um, a lot of people have been asking about this, uh, CEO search. And, uh, I just got a DM.

And, uh, just want to let everybody know that Mark Benioff and Bob Eiger are going to remain CEOs of Salesforce and Disney. This is just important CEO notifications. We're always tracking Molly the CEO position. People have a lot of questions for me about CEO jobs. So many. Those two are locked and loaded.

Congratulations to those incredible executives for doing a great job. We'll see you all tomorrow. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.